Video marketing is a form of advertising and audience building that is steadily increasing in popularity. Due to this rise in demand, more and more businesses are wondering how best to make use of this tool in their marketing strategies. The typical approach used to be uploading videos to the biggest social media platforms. Most notably YouTube, in the hope that the platforms, with their millions of users, would do the heavy lifting.
This approach is understandable; YouTube is owned by Google, meaning it must be fantastic for SEO, in addition to boasting a massive user base just waiting to hear what you have to offer. So what’s the downside? Well, while YouTube can be great for content creators looking to build a monetisable presence on the site itself, it falls flat when trying to drive traffic elsewhere. This means that even with a sizable YouTube presence, you may find the click-through rate to your site disappointingly low.
This is where Wistia Video comes in. Unlike YouTube, Wistia is designed with video marketers and businesses in mind, allowing you to tap into this valuable form of marketing without having to compete with the very site you are posting your content to. To find out how Wistia can make your marketing life easier, read on.
What is Wistia Video Hosting?
Let’s begin with a brief outline of what the service is. In short, Wistia provides an alternative to the more traditional forms of video marketing, YouTube again being the prime example. By using Wistia, you will have access to a video hosting platform designed specifically to meet the needs of businesses, without compromising on quality or audience satisfaction. You have a significant number of analytical tools and customisation options at your fingertips. Wistia links your videos directly to your site, rather than a third party. This is already pretty good on the surface, but Wistia has much more to offer than just that.
Wistia is a helpful tool, not a competitor
Viewing YouTube as a competitor might at first seem a bit strange. You post to their site, have access to a huge number of potential customers, and don’t have to spend a penny, so how is YouTube competing with you? As with any site, YouTube is one that is designed to keep its users on it for as long as possible. As such, there is little incentive to drive traffic to your site, as YouTube would lose out. Take sharing videos as an example. If your viewers were to share your video links, they would direct traffic to YouTube, not your site.
While a viewer that particularly enjoys your content might be inclined to put in the effort to find your site, think about how often that happens. Many users don’t even check the description of videos, let alone seek out external sites. Wouldn’t it be great to cut out this step between your videos and your site? As luck would have it, Wistia is a service that does exactly that. Rather than linking to another site, it embeds your videos directly into your pages. Directing potential customers where you want them to go.
Built around SEO
Linking to your site rather than another is all well and good. But if nobody can find your video then it isn’t particularly useful. Wistia Video, however, was designed with SEO and video marketing as a core concern. It comes with a suite of easy-to-use SEO tools and features, for example, metadata options, ensuring your content ranks highly.
An analyst’s paradise
One area that sets apart good video hosting platforms from great ones is the analytics on offer. To produce effective videos, you need to know what parts of your content strike a chord with your viewers, and how they engage with it. To this end, Wistia Video sports a wealth of data sets and tools that give you the much-needed insight into how your content is performing, in addition to the engagement rate of your viewers.
Some of these tools are what you would expect – a view count, watch time, percentage of engagement, and so on. However, in addition to these staples, Wistia provides a more unique feature called the heatmap. Essentially, this heatmap provides a more surgical view of how an individual viewer interacts with a video. It displays which parts they watched. Which they skipped, how much of a section was watched, and even how many times! On top of this, the heatmap will also show what device your viewer used. With such an in-depth tool, you should have no problem curating your content to really hit home with your audience.
Optimised for any device
There is no end to examples of sites that work perfectly fine on one device but are near useless on another. From an unnavigable site to key features not working, not being optimised for alternative devices can be a major turnoff for customers. Wistia does not disappoint in this area, boasting a high compatibility rate with all major devices. Better yet, the Wistia Video player will perform regardless of your preferred browser’s video player.
Unintrusive for your customers
YouTube is great for monetising your content, though exactly how it goes about generating income is often not so great. In large part, YouTube’s chosen monetisation plan is a focus on ads. With an emphasis being placed on pre-video and mid-roll ads. Saturating an entertainment video with ads is annoying enough, but having them on your professional videos is a quick way to wear thin a prospective customer’s patience. Wistia Video has made the prudent decision to leave your content ad-free, leaving you to get your message to your client directly, as opposed to being broken up by a couple of ad rolls.
Call to action integration
The purpose of video marketing is ultimately to turn viewers into customers. How this is done is most often with a call to action (CTA) being made somewhere within your videos. This leads to another one of Wistia’s fantastic features – the ability to embed a clickable CTA within your video. You could use this feature to direct your viewers to particular parts of your site, onto other videos, or even to your sales page if you think you’ve been convincing enough. This can help you really make the most of your video marketing.
On a similar note, Wistia Video is integrated with the leading newsletter providers, such as Mailchimp and AWeber. If you like, you could add the option to sign up to your newsletter within your video in the same way you would embed a call to action.
Completely Customisable
Wistia Video has no shortage of options you can tweak, allowing you to customise your video player to your liking. If you want to make your player more in line with your audience or brand, you can adjust sizes, fonts, colours, and make custom thumbnails. It’s well known that having an eye-catching thumbnail can make all the difference when attempting to get clicks. Having this feature is incredibly important. In addition to all this, Wistia has the option to include your socials, something no site can really do without.
Conclusion
Wistia Video is an outstanding video hosting platform. Coming with a host of expected features executed well, with its own unique additions to the table. Our selection of benefits is by no means exhaustive, which in itself is a testament to the quality of the service. If you are looking to make a start in video marketing, or want to spruce up an existing strategy, why not give Wistia a try?
