PandaDoc’s Senior Digital Content Producer shares why his team made the switch to VEED and how he’s now able to create video content more effortlessly with the help of our online editor.
Travis Tyler is a senior digital content producer at PandaDoc, a software company that enables organizations and solopreneurs to manage, create, and electronically sign their documents with ease.
Like the rest of us, Travis has also dealt with the stress of having to consistently create top-quality content with the limited time and resources available to him. However, switching to VEED has made his job easier.
He’s now able to create video content for PandaDoc with half the effort.
Let’s hear his story, as he shares:
- What PandaDoc is and what he does
- The role of video in PandaDoc’s marketing strategy
- Why they switched over from traditional editors to VEED
- How they use VEED to create high quality content
- How he would describe VEED to a friend
[#TOC1]Could You Briefly Explain What PandaDoc Does and Describe Your Role There?[#TOC1]
PandaDoc is an electronic signature and document automation software geared towards organizations, solopreneurs, and freelancers. You can use it to create proposals, contracts, quotes, invoices, forms, and payment slips. It’s a great alternative to more expensive or legacy tools, such as DocuSign and Word.
As a content producer, my job is to create everything, from webinars and fun social media posts, to video podcasts and talking-head educational videos. If there’s anything that involves a camera, I’m your guy.
[#TOC2]Why is Video Important for PandaDoc?[#TOC2]
Traditionally, in the B2B SaaS world, content has been very focused on the written word. While there’s no doubt it’s a very powerful marketing engine, there’s a lot of untapped potential in other content formats as well.
About three and a half years ago, we decided that in tandem with the text-based assets, such as blogs, eBooks, landing page content, and ads, we would double-down and invest in video content.
Three and a half years later, we now have:
- A video podcast with nearly 100,000 lifetime downloads and streams
- Video content that lives on YouTube and generates tens of thousands of organic and paid impressions per month, and also drives a ton of traffic to our website
- A vast library of videos used on different platforms across the organization to enable sales, customer success, and product initiatives at PandaDoc
[#TOC3]What Made You Switch to VEED?[#TOC3]
Our biggest video creation challenges included:
- Having the right skillset (i.e. technical video editing expertise)
- Being able to develop quality content on a consistent basis
- Having the budget to create great content
Seeing a tightening of budgets across the board in 2023, we realized we were spending a lot of money on Adobe licenses. I was asked to find a more cost-effective alternative that would still allow me to create awesome content.
I then went on to do some market research, which eventually led me to discover VEED.
I was first introduced to VEED through a few talented content creators who I was connected to on LinkedIn. They were huge VEED-ambassadors.
Continuing my research, I turned to review websites like Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius. VEED continuously kept popping up as a tool to consider.
Eventually, I ended up doing a free trial of VEED, and in the meantime also got some glowing reviews for it from some of my other peers on LinkedIn.
[#TOC4]What Do You Use VEED for?[#TOC4]
My favorite VEED features include:
- Remove background
- Clean audio
- Magic Cut
- Screen and camera recording
- Video resizing
- Custom export options
- Auto-subtitles
- Brand kits
When I was doing the free trial of VEED, the versatility and depth of the feature set is what truly sold me. For instance, the remove background feature is amazing. I love the clean audio tool as well, which has been a life-saver for me on multiple occasions when my audio was a bit janky.
The Magic Cut tool is really useful for my bigger, longer content. The simultaneous screen and camera recording option is amazing for internal content creation. And the list goes on!
Here are some specific ways I use all of these amazing features to create content at PandaDoc:
Creating a Wide Array of Social Media Content
We create a variety of videos for social media, ranging from hilarious, meme-style TikTok clips to educational talking-head videos. I use VEED to specifically add copyright-free music, sound effects, automated captions, graphics, and transitions to our video content — while exporting and hosting everything all in one.
Here's a sample educational talking-head video:
Repurposing Podcast Episodes to Create Teasers
I outsource the actual production and editing of our video podcast to an agency. Once I get the final episodes from my agency, I use VEED to create teaser videos. This mainly involves capturing specific highlight moments from those episodes, which I then share on social media. I prefer to do this on VEED because it offers a far more robust feature set compared to other tools.
Resizing Videos for Different Platforms
Each channel requires you to upload videos in specific dimensions. For example, LinkedIn prefers to really push 1:1 (square) videos. I may also want to be able to take the same clip formatted originally formatted in a 1:1 aspect ratio, and create a 9:16 vertical version of it. With VEED, you can do that with literally the click of a button.
Exporting Content in Different Formats
The content export functionality of VEED is impressively high-tech and allows me to generate my content in different file formats with ease. You’re not going to get this level of functionality and flexibility from any other online tool.
For instance, I recently made a 4-second GIF from a longer video in VEED, which ended up getting 13,000 impressions on LinkedIn. I could have also done this with a free tool, but the speed and ease of doing it with VEED (combined with the quality of the compression) was so much better than what I’ve experienced trying this with free tools.
Creating Consistently On-Brand Videos
When you’re creating a lot of videos for your organization, you don’t want them to look different. Instead, you want them to look consistent, so people watching them can instantly recognize they’re from your brand.
With VEED’s brand kit feature, you can upload your brand assets, such as your fonts and color. That way, any time you’re creating a video, your assets will always be there in the editor, ready to be used. This option speeds up the process and keeps your entire team on-brand. I’ve found this feature to be the biggest timesaver for me, especially when adding captions. It’s so easy to stylistically format the subtitles with our brand’s font and color.
[#TOC5]How Would You Describe VEED to a Friend?[#TOC5]
I like to think of VEED as like the Canva of video editing. Canva is great at replacing Photoshop, and enabling anyone to create stunning designs. VEED is doing the same thing, and enables anyone to create and edit amazing videos.
It’s a very approachable tool. Video content can be really intimidating for marketers and businesses who haven’t spent a lot of time learning how to use different software. What I like most about VEED is that it’s really intuitive, which helps you overcome that problem.
It feels like VEED is democratizing content creation, in the sense that complicated video editing tools are no longer gatekeeping awesome video creation.
