How BrokerChooser Transformed Hundreds Of Pages Into Video In Just A Couple Of Days

BrokerChooser is a website for quick and to-the-point online comparison of brokers, digital banks, and other providers. Since 2016, they have helped more than 10 million people with their investment decisions, and have tripled their growth from 2019 to 2020.

Among all of the great content, they have the so-called “Compare” pages. These pages compare two companies on a bunch of points.

BrokerChooser got the idea to simplify stats like these for their users even more than before. They wanted to create videos that would directly compare the three most important stats for each of their pages.

The catch? BrokerChooser has hundreds of pages comparing different brokers, digital banks, and other services. Manually, this would have been a nightmare — imagine editing a hundred videos yourself! Then, multiply that effort by ten. Unimaginable.

That’s precisely where Plainly stepped in. We helped BrokerChooser batch-create hundreds of engaging videos for their broker comparison pages. The whole project was done in only one week and all of the rendering was done in just a couple of minutes!

The Goals Of BrokerChooser

The guys at BrokerChooser wanted to increase their conversion rates and give their users more options in the way they consume their content — by transforming their pages into easily digestible videos. They were also aware of the huge SEO benefits, as their results could show up either as a video or as an article when someone looked up any two organizations that their website already compares.

To achieve both of these things, BrokerChooser wanted to create video content using text and image content they already had for each of the pages.

Compared to text and tables, video offers substantially greater benefits for users and is simply a far more engaging medium for the audience than text, static photos, etc.

Google also recognizes this. That’s why BrokerChooser’s traffic would turn out to be doubled, as they are now ranking not only for their articles, but also for the newly added video that’s on the same page, and appears in the same search as a separate result. 

Apart from the major increase in traffic, they were hoping that the videos would increase conversion rates because they engage the audience better.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s see exactly how they did it.

The Challenges They Faced

The biggest challenge for BrokerChooser was that they had a ton of content similar to the image above. Again, since, we’re talking literally hundreds of pages, creating the video content manually — well, it would’ve been basically impossible.

Even if we’re talking about an experienced video editor, it would’ve taken at least 30 minutes per video to do this, so manual options were out of the question. BrokerChooser realized that they needed to find a solution that would create videos for all these pages automatically.

The Solution

The solution for their problem was Plainly, which was a great fit for their platform. All BrokerChoser had to do was to create an After Effects template they were happy with, and then batch-render videos automatically using just a CSV.

The biggest advantage of this approach is that they were able to do this very quickly and precisely how they wanted.

The Implementation

Here’s a breakdown of how the implementation went for BrokerChoser’s needs:

1. Their team created the template in After Effects

Their internal creative team created a branded template with a lot of dynamic elements that would change based on score and similar parameters.

BrokerChoser’s team uploaded the After Effects template and chose the dynamic elements (elements that needed to be changed on each page automatically). In their case, these elements were:

• The names of two compared brokers
• Their Top 3 Important Stats (Research Scores, Account opening score, and Markets and products score)
• Overall score (With comparison winner highlighted)
  

2. They exported all of the text data regarding the different brokers into a CSV
   
   
3. They added that CSV into Plainly and pressed render
   
   
4. They also set up a Webhook that distributed these videos automatically to their storage, and also YouTube after they were done

I’d also like to point out that Plainly has YouTube integration now, which means all new projects can be handled in even fewer steps. Today, we’re able to set up video distribution in one click, instead of using Webhook.

Idea: How could this workflow be even better?

Interestingly, there are a few things that could have been done to make this workflow even more impressive:

• The template could’ve been longer,  and more complex. As this was just the first project (and done in a few days), BrokerChooser wanted to do something quick and simple. With After Effects you’re able to push creativity and I’m sure BrokerChooser will do that in some of the future projects.
• Plainly also offers clients to use their API to create an automated workflow. Instead of exporting data to the CSV, BrokerChooser could’ve set up a workflow that creates video on demand whenever there are new articles.
• With the new article-to-video functionality of Plainly, BrokerChooser could utilize Plainly's AI to read the article and create a more storytelling oriented video instead of a pure data driven video.

The Results

BrokerChooser’s team was able to export hundreds of unique videos for their website in just one day after setting this up. Those videos are also now available on their YouTube page, as well as their website — and this was just the first project.

Having videos both on the website and on YouTube means that they are capturing double the SERP real estate. This means that they got an increase in traffic by an additional 17%. Not too bad for a day of work.

After the success of this endeavor, BrokerChooser is planning on doing new projects in 2024 with Plainly.

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