Entrepreneurs Piyush Saggi and Nitesh Chhajwani set out to bridge the connection between sales and marketing teams with SalesTing, a tool that provided insight into how and where each individual sales or marketing team member contributed to acquiring specific leads.
But then, Saggi and Chhajwani realized their customers were using their product for a wholly different function — content engagement.
“Our clients were using our tools at SalesTing to measure content effectiveness. They would actually find out that their audience wasn’t really consuming their text-based content. That’s when we realized that, even in our personal life, our reading and content consumption habits were changing dramatically,” says Saggi. Namely, they pinpointed a rapid transfer to video-based marketing.
Companies that use video for online marketing do indeed see more engagement — 41 percent more organic traffic to their websites than those who don’t use video. But, while videos help consumers retain a brand’s message, in the B2B world, long videos won’t pass.
“A lot of B2B companies are producing long-form video content and had the same problem with content consumption. People don’t want to sit down and watch a 16-minute video recording of a webinar panel,” says Saggi.
At that moment, Saggi and Chhajwani realized that this was a glaring problem. They saw an opportunity in the market and pivoted SalesTing into a new venture: AI-powered video editor Parmonic.
“It was hard to walk away [from SalesTing]. Do we press the reset button, especially with paying clients that we love? But then we realized that even our clients were having this problem,” says Saggi. “This is a bigger problem to solve both for our current clients and potentially a much bigger market.”
When a B2B marketer uploads a video to Parmonic, the AI technology automatically finds and extracts the most key moments in the video. Most B2B videos, from webinars to trainings and talks, have specific, defined structures, so natural language processing can find those patterns and highlight the most important parts into one condensed video.
The platform then pushes the video into Parmonic’s publishing engine, where marketers can see the shorter storyboards and embed the abbreviated version to landing pages, blog posts, and social media for easier consumption. The publishing area also offers limited video editing capabilities.
So marketers can track how well their video performs, Parmonic can integrate with most marketing automation tools, including Marketo, Salesforce, HubSpot and more.
“One of the things we want to accomplish here is around democratizing video. While we love professional video editors, most B2B marketers don’t have the budget, skill or time to operate more sophisticated tools. We’re making video marketing as easy as literally editing a PowerPoint slide,” says Saggi.
As a part of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the Parmonic team is working closely with Georgia Tech to refine the platform’s knowledge and understanding of video content.
“That’s where the true machine learning comes into the picture… it’s actually adapting to how people consume a brand’s content, so that way the brand becomes better at serving the right content,” says Saggi.
Parmonic has two pricing models: a monthly or annual subscription fee, and an on-demand model where marketers can purchase a specific number of videos. They closed a seed round for an undisclosed amount this fall with investors from Atlanta, San Francisco, Florida and Sweden.
