Challenges Facing SMBs
Small-medium businesses (SMBs) are the backbone of our economy. SMBs play a major role in most economies worldwide. In the emerging markets of Southeast Asia, SMBs are particularly centric to economic development, which make up 97% of the businesses and generate 70% of job opportunities.
However, with limited resources and smaller financial base, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the SMBs hard. Two-thirds of the SMBs in Asia Pacific have reported a fall in sales and more than a quarter of global SMBs have closed during the lockdown.
The public health restrictions brought by COVID-19 has shifted not only our lifestyles but has also challenged SMB’s ability in adopting new ways of customer interactions.
Prior to the pandemic, many SMBs, especially that of the manufacturing industry, relied highly on physical events like expos and face-to-face business meetings to generate sales, where only around 20% of customer interactions were digital.
As remote working has become the new normal, it is now inevitable to move business deals toward online channels. Businesses are required to transform the existing product/service content into digital format to keep intact with their customers. Internal communication is no exception but to go digital as well. Level of digitization has therefore become a key constraint for SMBs to survive during the pandemic.
Image 1: How content in the past has been videolized to improve efficiency and communication costs.
Despite playing a major role in economic development, SMBs perform relatively poorly in adopting digital marketing strategies. Even though 80% of the SMBs in Taiwan own a website, only 40% have social media presence and less than one third utilizes e-commerce.
As more business establishments shift to online platforms, demand for content digitization runs high, but content creation is time consuming and labor intensive, which makes going digital even harder for SMBs, as most firms have limited budgets and access to digital advertising resources.
Videolize with AI
AI technology company GliaCloud is a video solution provider to empower the media, advertising industry and most importantly, SMBs to turn their stories into quality videos at scale. GliaCloud has developed a video creation platform with simplified workflow to help SMBs that have limited digital literacy to generate video content in minutes.
In order to provide services to thousands of business owners, we set up a user-friendly content collection form with auto-fills API, structuralize video contents, and automate the creation processes. With the help of AI, we were able to cover up the non automated parts with very little human resources, at a ratio of 2 consultants to 1100 clients.
Creating content for different digital channels is an exciting yet complicated work. Each platform has its preference and rules, so using the same piece of material isn’t viable in the digital world. The question has now become - how can SMBs with little resources build their digital presence and keep up with the content demanding online platforms? GliaCloud understands the struggle, so we continue to build video solutions aligning to various platforms.
Data-Driven Therefore Scalable
The beauty of AI-made videos is that they are data driven. All the elements in the videos can be optimized based on user behaviors.
We collect editing preferences such as layout, icons, and animation effects as well as viewer behaviors like video view through rate and completion rate. Then our machine learning models will learn and suggest the best practices such as image ratio, font, and design to help our users achieve their specific goals.
Over the past years, GliaStudio has proudly generated millions of videos with AI and has collected over hundred million of viewing behaviors. We use these data to build simpler tools for our users and better content for their audiences.
Videos come in all shapes and forms. Different video formats are required for serving different purposes. There is nothing as one video fits all, but we can make complex things simple. GliaCloud builds solutions with simplified creation steps according to specific user scenarios, offering video solutions from vertical stories, 2D character animation, to various layouting creatives.
Another key to making video creation simple is that we only offer the “necessary” editing features. We selected the most edited elements in videos, removed the “extra” features, and included AI such as layout recommendations to lower the entry barrier of video creation.
GliaStudio for Facebook Business
Later this year, we will be launching our video creation tool for SMBs which will allow businesses to re-use existing fan page assets, catalog information and product feeds to generate posts, stories, and even ads on Facebook. From material preparation, content creation to distribution, business users can generate content without the hassle of switching among multiple tools.
We believe with our solution, AI can now be more accessible and supportive to the less digitized groups.
The impact of the COVID-19 has pushed businesses to transform to digital platforms in a short period of time. It is now imperative for SMBs to adopt digital strategies, as digital marketing is not just a growing trend, but the new normal. GliaCloud will provide solutions for SMBs to navigate the challenge and further accelerate the process with AI.
Source:
ARTICLE WRITTEN BY: AGNES PENG
Agnes Peng is the Co-founder & COO of GliaCloud.
GliaCloud is part of our Facebook Business Solutions Accelerator program in Singapore.
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