Youtube vs. Vimeo vs. Wistia

Transcription:

The goal of all video marketing should be to generate revenue. And one of the first steps on that is getting somebody on to your website. It’s on your website, you’ve got the best chance of converting them from a cold prospect into a warmer one. Alternatively, they might already be on your website through a Google search or referral or some other path. In each of those situations, the video needs to be hosted on a different platform to maximize the opportunity of creating a new customer.

In this video, we’re gonna look at four different places to host your video. And also why YouTube might not be the best solution to store all of your content.

Understanding the Audience

Okay, first of all, it’s useful to think about the purpose of the video that you’re creating. If you’re talking to a cold audience, then you’re gonna need to be where that audience is. So that’s going to be YouTube or a social channel or somewhere where there is already an established audience. In that situation, you’re going to need to be providing some value upfront. You’re going to need to be providing some information, some advice, some expertise, something that is going to catch people’s attention and get them to watch.

On the other hand, if you’ve just add a company promotional video created or an explainer showing a specific service that you offer or something like that, that’s probably better served to a warm audience. So maybe an audience that’s already on your website. The audience is different and there are different hosting platforms that are tailored to these different situations. Let’s have a look at three and see what the differences are.

YouTube

Okay first up let’s start with YouTube. Now YouTube is a search engine and that’s different from social media channels. You want to think of YouTube in the same way that you think of a blog or the same strategy that you apply to a blog. So you’re looking at creating content around search terms and keywords that people are going to find through searching on YouTube. A lot of companies think that YouTube is the defacto place to upload all of your content. And really that’s only partially true. There are benefits to YouTube but there’s also slight drawbacks.

So for example, if you’re going to embed your content on your site, you’ve got to be really careful with the embed code that comes from YouTube. So unless you specifically switch it off in the settings, YouTube will show recommended videos at the end of every video that it embeds. That’s gonna take people away from your site. If you’ve embedded something on your site, of your own content, and then there’s link off of that, away from back to YouTube, you’re endanger then of losing the audience that you very carefully bought on to your site. There’s also a button on YouTube that’s always going to take you away even if you change that embed code, you always land up with a YouTube button on a YouTube video that will take you away to YouTube. So it isn’t necessarily the best for embedding content on your site.

If you’re consistent with YouTube and you use it for that video blogging and for providing expertise and solutions to people’s problems, you can build a steady audience overtime and that would be a valuable asset for you later on down the line. So whilst there might not be any direct benefit from uploading a promotional video or an explainer to YouTube, there’s also not any harm in uploading it. It’s free, it’s going to come up in YouTube and Google searches if people are searching for you specifically. But there might be better ways in hosting platforms to embed on to your website. And we’re gonna look at one of those in just a minute.

So the best use for YouTube is really video blogs, how-tos, and keyword rich content that people are gonna be searching for.
Pros, there’s a massive audience with YouTube. About half the population of the world use it. It’s in the top three websites globally. And obviously it’s free.
On the flip side is that, embedded videos that we’ve already talked about can be a little bit of a challenge and not always that beneficial to what you’re doing. And the analytics are limited on it as well.

Vimeo

Okay, next up is Vimeo. And Vimeo is probably better known amongst the creative communities and filmmakers and kind of businesses that are generating high level kind of premium content.

Now, there’s plenty of things you can do with Vimeo that can’t do with YouTube. You can setup a paygate so that you can charge people to watch certain pieces of content. You can add passwords to content if you want to keep it a little bit more private and circulate it. And a lot of the embedding facility is slightly more flexible. So there’s ways of removing all of the branding and the buttons on a video that you’ve embedded on your site. There’s an entry level for Vimeo which is free which allows you to upload a certain amount of data per month. And then there’s a premium level which offers more features like the paygate, more data, that kind of thing.

The disadvantages of Vimeo is that obviously it’s not going to come up in a YouTube search. It will come in a Google search but the audience is much smaller and you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to build that vast audience or global audience outside of those kind of creative circles that Vimeo is known for.

Wistia

Okay number three on the list is Wistia. And Wistia is a really powerful video marketing platform that has great analytics and allows you to do some really interesting things to track the use of your video. So for example you can tie a video to an email address by tracking its IP in a campaign which will allow you to see who out of the email list that you’ve sent, has watched the video, engaged with it, how much they’ve watched. So there are loads of SEO tools and backend tricks that you can use in Wistia to really maximize the audience that is watching it and to help market it. In addition to that, it has really great embedding features which allow you to remove all the branding. They allow you to create popup windows so that the video pops up over the screen as well as inline embeds that will adjust to mobile formats.

Really it’s designed for use on a website through a campaign in that later stage of the funnel. So for people who already connected with you and already warmer prospects.

So best use for Wistia is for website videos, training videos, and campaigns. Pro’s: it’s great analytics, great for embedding.
On the flip side of that, there’s no public search on Wistia videos. No audience there for people to be able to subscribe to what you’re doing. And that is quite pricey. You get three videos for free and beyond that, you’re going to have to be fairly committed to your video strategy to deal with the monthly cost of that ongoing.

Social Media

And finally number four is uploading directly to social media channels. Now social media channels like to keep you on their page. They like to get you there and keep you there. So they will reward videos that are uploaded natively, that is directly to their platform. And they’ll give the much better reach than links to YouTube or Vimeo. So if you’re gonna use something like Facebook or Instagram to publish your video, you need to upload it directly to the platform.

Now it’s worthwhile thinking about the platform before you do that and what the platform requirements are. And that might be a technical requirement like square format for Instagram. But also a practical one. So people on social media are impatient and busy and quite often just snacking on content. So you might want to chop a longer video up into smaller pieces for social media. You might want to subtitle it. That’s also really important because nobody watches video with the volume turned up anymore. And you want to think about maybe publishing that content to the channels that we’ve already talked about in this video as well. So it’s an additional way of distributing content. Once you’ve uploaded it directly to the platform, you’d going to get more benefits in terms of analytics, being able to build audiences in the case of things like Facebook and Instagram off the back of that video. And also see who’s watching it and reach those new audiences through those social platforms as well.

So I hope that’s being useful. There are four different solutions there for where to put video, where you start and where you finish in terms your marketing funnel is really important and you needed to think about that. What is this piece of video? What’s its function? What’s its job? Who’s gonna watch it and where are they? That might start with something like YouTube and the cold audience over here and then as they follow through that funnel on to your website, you are using Wistia at the end of that process to track who they are and figure out who’s really engaged with that content.

That’s all from me for now. My name’s David Kilkelly. Follow us on YouTube for more video marketing…