Video marketing has really come of age lately with businesses and brands across a wide spectrum now embracing the medium and setting aside realistic marketing budget to get it right. We have found the emphasis is very much on producing high-quality video content using professional video production companies. That’s great news and certainly, we spend much less time educating clients about the value of video as they come to recognise the ROI it provides.

As businesses and brands develop video content the discussion often comes round to video hosting and the best platforms available. Amongst our clients YouTube is the ‘go to’ platform that everyone uses. It’s free, well integrated with the mighty Google, hugely popular and works well on all devices. Why consider anything else? Well, the first thing to understand is this is not an ‘either or’. We would recommend to all of our clients that they absolutely should host all of their videos on YouTube for the reasons stated above.

However, think of your video content as a beautiful painting commissioned just for you. It cost you a great deal of time, money and effort and you adore it right? So, why put it in the cheapest frame possible and ask your customers to love it too? When embedding video content on your website we would definitely recommend a paid for video platform that shows your videos off in the best light. It’s a small price to pay in comparison to the cost of producing the video.

As a video production company, we want the videos that appear on our website to look their very best and there is no doubt some of the paid for video hosting platforms do a better job than the free alternatives. So, we went on the hunt, did the research and chose a rising star called Wistia. With business packages starting at $25 per month we were not afraid to pay because the benefits were well worth it.

This is why we chose Wistia:

1. Flawless playback on any device

We spent a great deal of time testing this on PC’s, Macs, Safari, Chrome, iPhone, Android etc and the results were clearly in favour of Wistia. Literally, no other player is as smooth and flawless and many of our clients are now commenting on this fact.

2. Player controls

The player looks great and you have complete control over the colours, sharing options and player buttons. A really good feature is that once a video is uploaded and embedded onto your website you can make changes to the video which automatically updates everywhere that you have the video embedded. This saves loads of time.

3. Conversion tools

There are a number of really useful conversion tools including a call to action screen, email collection function and options for integration with your preferred email marketing platform.

4. Powerful analytics

The statistics available for videos on Wistia are clear and easy to use. You can see the IP details of who has looked at your video, when, how many times and for how long. With heat maps you can also discover the most popular parts of the video and when viewers drop off.

5. SEO and social sharing

With Wistia you can easily create video site maps that will get your video pages listed on the search engines. More importantly, these links will take viewers to your actual pages rather than a third party host. Wistia has also developed a way to integrate shared videos in Twitter.

Overall Wistia is a tool for brands and businesses and that’s where their focus lies. This means that tutorials, support and advancements are geared towards helping you as a business get a better return on your video content.

For more information on developing your own brand video Email Us or call 01563 509005. To see some examples of corporate videos we have produced please visit the video page.

Please note The Marketing Café has no affiliation or business links with Wistia. These are purely our own views based on research, experience and customer feedback.