A strategy is important. There is no way around it. Putting a plan together to approach your marketing campaign is crucial. Luckily there are great trusted brands that deliver excellent service while providing your business with all the data and results you need.
Let us introduce—Wistia.
Wistia is a great online video platform created to optimize your video marketing distribution. They specialize in helping you understand your video marketing efforts.
In this rendition of In-Sites we will review Wistia and provide you with a comprehensive review of their step-by-step process to hosting your videos online.
Online video is the here, the now and the future. But as Will Keenan said, “It’s not just what you upload but rather the strategy with which you upload.” Your strategy should include the following:
- Identifying and considering your buyer personas
- Planning an Inbound Video Marketing Strategy
- Storyboarding your topic
- Hosting your online videos
- Implementing Best Practices for Corporate Videos
- Developing SEO Best Practices for Video Distribution
Wistia is a professional online video platform for businesses. They provide a solution for you to present your videos on the web. In addition, they support data tracking and assist you in building and engaging your digital audience.
Using Wistia means you maintain ownership and control over your content.—wistia.com
Hosting
Wistia is a dynamic platform that you can try today for free. How it works:
- Sign-up and upload your video
- The free account version allows for 3 video uploads
- Embed the videos within your email marketing campaign or on your website
It’s that simple.
However, by using Wistia there are extensive features to enhance your online video.
Benefits to Wistia versus other platforms like YouTube
Wistia is designed to help you add video to your website and track how your video marketing efforts are performing.
Unlike YouTube, with Wistia you can:
- present your video without 3rd party advertisement pre-roll or interruption
- customize your video player to match your brand or themed color scheme
- use video SEO to increase traffic to your site
- generate new leads
- engage leads for growing your business
- review advanced data analytics
Player
First things first, we must talk about your video player. This is the key way in which both prospects and customers can engage with your creative dynamic content.
Responsive
Wistia allows you the option to create a fixed video screen size or make it responsive. You have the option to choose your format depending on your business needs and preference.
Customizable
- Appearance
- Customize your player visual display to fit your business.
- Controls
- You can add clips to other videos or photos in the upper hand corners of your video. You can allow access to a faster playback speed, set-up or take away refresh buttons, pause and stop buttons etc.
- Call to Actions
- You can place custom call-to-action text within the video or even before the video plays. For example, through turnstile timeline actions you can request viewers input an email address before viewing your content.
- Password Protected Content
- Protect your content and who is allowed to see it by setting up the password section on your viewer playback.
- Timeline actions
- Prompt your video to automatically load and display call-to-actions or insert content on you video at a specific moment during playback. Timeline actions help you achieve the perfect marketing timing to maximize on leads.
- Captions
- Customize your captions size, fonts, colors and display style to your needs within your marketing video.
- Upload vs. Recording
- You have the freedom to upload content directly into Wistia from a file on your computer or you can record content within Wistia that can be saved and delivered across social media or a marketing campaign.
Adaptable
Integrate services you already use such as HubSpot right into your Wistia video campaigns. This adaptable platform allows for easy integration with other marketing automation software as well as compatibility with versatile websites (WordPress, Squarespace, Wix and virtually any other site).
Social Sharing
Yes, that’s right; Wistia also allows you to share content via your business social profiles directly on their site inside your profile portal. This is such great news.
No need to storyboard, capture and edit your video then upload to a social media automation platform for distribution across channels. With Wistia you can tackle your social media video needs directly on the platform, cutting out the middle service.
All your video needs can be completed within this one platform. Once you decide that you love Wistia and move from the free account to a paid account, the Wistia logo will disappear from all your videos. Whether you are a paying customer or a free subscriber, the same high definition quality will be delivered to your user. No slow buffering or time consuming loading times. Your business video and audio playback will be professional and deliver quality content to your prospects.
SEO
- Designed to get clicks to your site
- Wistia knows what you want and that is site traffic. Having you in mind they included video marketing software optimized to garner traffic back to your site. Unlike other video hosting platforms that bring viewers back to their site, Wistia drives that traffic back to your website for optimized conversion and SEO.
- Step-up free / copy paste
- It’s as simple as 1, 2, embed. With embed links that are customizable you can create links that utilize your desired search engine keywords to enhance SEO.
- Gain higher visibility on search engines like Google
- With all the customizable SEO features your site will be optimized for higher search engine placement within sites like Google or Bing.
Optimized Engagement
Your clients and prospects are visiting your business to learn more about you and gather valuable information from your company. The ability to view the ways your prospects are interacting with your video content can be extremely valuable.
Wistia provides data such as an interactive heatmap that allows you to track conversions and displays detailed information on how prospects are interacting with your content.
- Heatmap
- Tracks views, collects data on clicks, displays moment by moment percentage of viewers engaged in your video. The moment engagement data allows you to see what percentage of viewers were engaged in your video and how long they were engaged. If viewers are watching throughout the video until the end it will show. If viewers stop watching content somewhere along the video feed, Wistia’s data will also show you where views trail off.
Data Ova’ Here
As mentioned above, Wistia provides a surplus data to enhance your marketing efforts. Some of the data offered includes:
- Heatmaps
- Engagement graphs
- Impact monitoring
99% of all users use under 200MB for their video hosting needs. If you ever approach that limit, Wistia will email you and let you know you are approaching the limit. At that moment you can negotiate a larger data allotment. If you know in advance that you will need more data, you can contact customer service and they would be happy to organize a plan for you. If you are not interested in negotiating new data limits you can always free up space by releasing previous loaded content for new videos.
Somebody say what? 360 Video?
You heard correctly. Wistia is capable and equipped to handle your 360 video needs. Too good to be true, right? Well, check out their short video on this cool feature below:
Using video to connect with a prospect is so much more than a cold call. It humanizes the selling process.—Jill Rowley Social Selling Evangelist
Video Management
Does Wistia sound good to you? I know we love it here at Direct Images Interactive. In addition to their awesome features for marketing integration and online video they assist with library documentation. The library cataloging of your videos are as easy as drag and drop. You can have an organized and optimized workspace in no time.
How much does it cost?
Free. Hard to believe, right? Well, the first entry package on Wistia is free. If you know you’re going to need to host more than 5 videos, you want to look at the paid options. The most popular is pay-as-you-go. You can scale up or scale down at any time without penalty. You can also pay annually if that is what you are interested in.
Too good to be true? Sounds too easy? Well, it is in fact that simple and super easy.
Start your free trial today: https://wistia.com/trials/new/directimages
If you need any help or have questions, we’re listening—send us a note @directimages or leave a comment below. In the meantime checkout our top video blogs to get all your questions answered.
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