In The News

There seems to be a new AI headline in the news everyday, and today is no different. Just recently, OpenAI released Sora. Sora is a text-to-video generation tool designed to change the way businesses create and use video content. Specifically, this tool can be used for animating images, remixing videos, and creating video content from text prompts. One caveat is that access to this feature is limited to ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro subscribers, with pricing tiers that include up to 50 videos at 720p resolution for $20 per month, and unlimited video generations at 1080p resolution for $200 per month.

Sora And Your Small Business

Use Cases

So, how can your startup or small business utilize Sora? Here are a few common use cases:

• Marketing, Branding and Advertising: Sora can be used to create promotional videos, product demos, and social media content in minutes. For example, your small business could create animated videos that tell your brand’s story, create video content for trending social media topics while the topic is still active, or create step-by-step user guides for new products or features.

• Customer Engagement: The video-creation tool can be used to develop interactive visual content to educate and engage customers. It can also be used to quickly turn around thank-you videos or personalized messages for customer milestones.

• Employee Training and Onboarding: With Sora, you can more efficiently create training videos or onboarding materials for new hires, or even automate the creation of explainer videos.

Benefits

Now, let’s take a look at the benefits of using Sora for any of the above use cases:

• Cost Efficiency: Sora enables your startup or small business to create video content without professional videographers or editors. And not having to hire professional videographers or editors will help save you money, even if it means still paying for Sora’s subscription fees.

• Time Efficiency: Because Sora can generate video content automatically, your business won’t have to deal with the normal turnaround time for professional videos. Like the example above, Sora could help you create a video on a hot topic as soon as that topic starts trending.

• Increased Creative Ownership: By moving the video creation process in-house, you retain full ownership of the final video product, rather than relinquishing some of the creative decisions to a production team. Sora also allows customization options for unique branding and messaging.

Conclusion

Sora offers an innovative way to create and use video content in your startup or small business. And, as outlined above, there are many benefits to using this tool. However, there are also fees associated with Sora. So before you jump in and start creating AI videos, it’s important to weigh the benefits against the costs.

From an ROI perspective, Sora’s ability to create social media content, customer engagement videos, and training materials without the need for professional videographers or costly editing software presents an opportunity to spend less while getting more. But for small businesses with limited digital marketing budgets, it may be best to first test manually created video content to see if that medium offers any increase in engagement or brand awareness. If it does, the next step may be to experiment with the lower pricing tier, and then work up as needed.