HeyGen: Viral Video Marketing Success

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As a startup, HeyGen has achieved enormous success with an in-house marketing team using its own technology to demonstrate how AI videos can be done more efficiently by saving time, being cost-effective, and eliminating the need for camera crews, actors, and expensive equipment traditionally used in video production.

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The Challenge

Creating a viral video using our own technology would be the ultimate use-case. Could it could be done, and if so, how?

• The time needed to create a script: What will this viral video be about?
• Training actors: Do we train actors or use our (unofficial) in-house ambassador?
• When to release the video:  A future product release is imminent, so do we wait until it’s ready or tease it to the word, in the hopes that the public will love it and the video will go viral
• Where will the video be released: On the HeyGen platform or on social media (and if it’s the latter, X (formerly Twitter,) Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Linkedin?

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We knew that we had a viral product, but we needed to make sure that the messaging was clean and let consumers know that this is the future of video marketing.

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The Solution

The HeyGen marketing team decided to tease an upcoming (custom) avatar feature that would revolutionize the industry. The team felt that X would be the platform that would get the technology noticed, first by the industry and then by consumers. On August 8, 2023, he tweeted the upcoming ‘Josh 2.0 Avatar’, and the rest is history. We would tease the avatar and start a waitlist of the product.

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The biggest dilemma was which platform to place it on, so we chose the CEO Josh Xu’s personal Twitter account. As the unofficial HeyGen ambassador, it made sense.

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We knew we had a great idea, but three million views on Twitter, thousands of likes and comments, and more shares than we could ever imagine was mind-blowing.

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The Results

On August 8, 2023, Josh tweeted the upcoming ‘Josh 2.0 Avatar’, and the rest is history. Three million views, thousands of likes, and shares. Too many comments to answer. The post was also shared on LinkedIn and had a huge (positive) reaction there.

• Productivity: Consumers realized that these realistic avatars could/would change the marketing world forever. The ability to create videos to scale in a few minutes meant unlimited video marketing capabilities, allowing teams to create AI-generated videos daily, a feat that was not previously an option.
• Cost Savings: No scouting for locations, paying actors, studio time, or costly camera equipment. With HeyGen, videos can be made on already existing devices.
• Waitlist for Josh 2.0: The waitlist was originally a way for us to see how interested the public would be within days 30k + people had joined the waitlist, and it is the most anticipated release in HeyGen’s history.

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We were hoping it would go viral, but wanting to get noticed by the industry was so important.

Summary:

A small startup is capable of producing viral content using the existing AI tools currently available to the public. The goal was to utilize our own product to prove that it could be done organically. No ads were necessary because the messaging was on point but the quality of HeyGen’s future release was immediately recognized.

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