First things first, let’s establish the facts about video. If you don’t have it in your marketing plans, you are making a massive mistake. Video is here and it is the future of marketing. We are in a digital age, a handheld digital device age, no less.
Everywhere we go, we crave entertainment, information and visuals. We may not have time to read an article or even the interest. But we will invest 30 seconds to 2 minutes of our time to watch a video. And it stays with us. Provided it is quality and engaging content.
Video a way to engage your customers and increase your sales qualified leads. Yet how do you get the ROI information to back this up? You can’t just stick a video up and hope for the best. You’ll be waiting, twiddling your thumbs.
You need to capture the contact information and analytics from these videos, and I’m afraid that the public free share platforms just don’t have the right kind of tools or analytics to really drill down deep and convert those leads.
You need a web based video hosting that will provide you with deep dive marketing and analysis tools.
You’re looking for Wistia. An incredible platform that is set to revolutionise the way you market your videos and convert leads. At The Kingdom, we can’t get enough of this amazing hosting platform. Here are our favourite aspects:
Keep the Focus on You
YouTube and Vimeo are great. They are full of funny, stupid, time wasting and hour consuming footage of idiots jumping off roofs and cats falling off everything. It’s a riot. Is this really where you want your quality content going? Do you want your business to be in the same field as cat memes and drunken party antics? How about lip syncing Koreans dancing to Madonna? It’s a distraction, and often not entirely appropriate.
Wistia gives you back that control. No one wants to let their hard work – and the money you just spent developing your video – to get lost in the fray.
You can also insert “annotation links” in your Wistia videos, which is a great feature to suggest related content to your users. Say, for example, you put up a video promoting your new product – you can put a link to your website in an annotation link to help direct traffic back to your site. Or you could enhance a recorded presentation with a link to your relevant SlideShare deck.
Embedded Video
That’s great, you say, but I embed my videos onto my web pages. So none of these features apply to me.
Au contraire, mon ami. Wistia doesn’t display irrelevant “relevant videos” at the end of your embedded video, nor does it cover up your amazing videography with a banner ad.
Wistia also gives tons of options for customising the way your video displays, and they are all responsive to your screen size. With a Wistia video, you can even embed your video as a popover, so when the user presses play, the video pops out to fill up the window and eliminates other distractions.
Heatmapping
Wistia gives you the power to see through people’s boredom threshold with heatmapping.
You can see precisely at what point people have lost interest in your video, when they stopped viewing, how long they have been viewing it for and when they – literally – switched off.
This is invaluable data for improving your edits, knowing your customer’s pulse points, and tailoring future products and content. Plus, as you build up your video library, you’ll be able to track what kinds of content, lengths, and styles get the most traction with your audience.
Branding
Unlike players like Vimeo and Youtube that don’t allow you to remove their icons from the product, Wistia gives you full control. This means you are making it entirely about your product, your branding, and your audience. An embedded YouTube video on your website might show your customer an ad for someone else’s product. But Wistia is ad-free, so there’s no more random annoying advertising popping up to distract.
With a service like YouTube, your viewers get shown “Related Videos” at the end of yours, some of which are not from your channel and most of which have nothing to do with your content. Wistia, on the other hand, let’s you tailor the experience from beginning to end – you can even change the color of the buttons to match your brand.
Ownership
This is a biggie for us and it should be for you, too.
What many people don’t realise is that by putting something up on YouTube, you are ceding ownership to the video over to YouTube (and, therefore, Google).
Check it out. It’s all in the fine print. Google officially owns that content now. Not the case with your Wistia-hosted videos, which you own, control and are entirely, truly, madly, deeply yours.
Marketing Features
So your viewer just finished watching your video. What are they supposed to do now? As inbound marketers know, it’s all about guiding your prospects down the sales funnel. That was pretty hard to do with video, though, until Wistia came along.
Wistia is littered with incredible marketing features. Not only are your videos highly shareable, with social sharing icons embedded directly below, but you can also build in helpful lead generation tools directly into your videos! Wistia has a tool called Turnstile that allows you to build in email harvesting.
Say you have a premium piece of content – like a recorded seminar or maybe a coaching video – that you’d like to point visitors to. You can put up an email capture form at the beginning your video itself and make that video a piece of (lightly) gated content.
Or maybe you have an incredibly popular video but you aren’t able to convert on those prospects.
Wistia lets you put a form at the end of your video so you can ask these visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.
Wistia also offers inbuilt CTAs to make it even easier to map out your sales funnel. Have a video about your new product? Put a CTA at the end with a link your your eCommerce store. While YouTube enables this functionality, it is only for “established” accounts with more than 500 hours of video – a pretty big hurdle to overcome when you’re just starting out.
Marketing Integrations
This is the most explosively powerful aspect of Wistia. Wistia is tremendously powerful, but if it were simply another lead general channel to keep track of, we wouldn’t love it so much.
Wistia integrates seamlessly with any number of marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, Marketo, Pardot, and (of course) HubSpot. When your viewers fill out your forms, their information gets added to your email lists! No more popping from program to program to organise your contacts lists.
If you pay for Wistia’s integration with HubSpot, you’ll also get your viewers activity logged into the contact’s timeline, just as if they were browsing your HubSpot-tracked website. Amazing!
With tracking and integration features like these, you can harness your contacts’ video-viewing history in your lead scoring and sales funnel.
YouTube and Vimeo are great platforms for people who want to monetise their videos – Justin Bieber, for example, would never have become worth $200M had he hosted videos on Wistia. But for a company looking to host beautiful, customised, and powerful videos on their website and landing pages, Wistia is absolutely the superior video hosting platform. If you still have questions on one vs the other, check out Wistia's excellent blog on the topic.
Want to learn more about the HubSpot CRM integration and how Wistia can help you convert, engage and delight your customers into sales qualified leads? You can read Wistia’s official blog here, or book a time to chat with Adam Steinhardt, CEO about how to improve your inbound marketing.
