For the last several years, Animoto has offered web and mobile apps that take photos and videos that its users have shot and pieces them together into beautiful video assets. And while it’s primarily been known as a consumer-facing technology, it’s gotten a lot of attention from businesses that wish to use its tools to promote their products and services. Now it’s making that an even easier proposition by allowing businesses to upload their own logos through its video creation flow.
The Animoto for Business offering has existed for a while, giving users the ability to create and download an unlimited number of videos for $249 a year or $39.99 a month. But Animoto’s growth with SMBs was particularly strong last year, and marked an inflection point for the company.
Thanks to increased adoption, it’s now got more than 40,000 small businesses paying to use its platform — and that’s without having many differentiated tools to support them. Animoto is seeking to change that, by adding features that will appeal to those customers.
“In 2013, we hit a tipping point where the majority of the growth in our revenue was coming from small businesses,” founder Brad Jefferson told me. “Now we are doing things to service them explicitly.”
That includes offering backgrounds with colors that are in touch with their brands, giving them more business-appropriate styles and music to choose from, and so on. But it also means offering up higher resolution videos that render at 1080p, and doing away with the Animoto branding at the end of the video.
The ability to add logos to videos in the creation flow was one of the most widely requested features by Animoto’s business customers, and should help them to differentiate themselves from the pack. Putting it in the web creation flow will also help Animoto to upsell customers who weren’t already part of its business package. The company is also planning to expand the functionality into its mobile apps in the future.
Animoto has raised $30 million since it was founded in 2006, including a big $25 million round of funding in 2011.