Useful tool: Wistia video hosting
Take the guesswork out of hosting, tracking views, measuring ROI of video marketing
Any marketer worth his or her salt is talking about video. "It's the next big thing in content marketing," they say, "and besides, your YouTube videos are getting massive SEO bumps on Google."
Recently I heard an industry thought leader say that if you don't have a video strategy, you don't have a future strategy for your business.
Yikes.
Let's get serious about video for a minute. My college career was all about video production. My first job out of college was at an NBC affiliate in PA (hello WGAL), and with this experience under my belt I can clearly say:
Video is hard to do well.
Thankfully, in 2014 modern marketers can leverage Wistia to achieve video nirvana.
At its core, Wistia is a video hosting company. You create videos, upload them to your Wistia account, then grab whatever embed code you need to display it on your website, link it inside drip emails, play it across every conceivable device, etc.
Best of all, it's super-cheap and it just plain works with a few clicks. No technical knowledge necessary. Consider this first challenge conquered.
But Wistia does much more than play host.
It's also been created with content marketers in mind. With a few clicks, you can connect your Wistia account to your Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua... heck, just about any modern marketing automation software.
This makes it easy to upload once, embed many, then track every single view right inside your automation software. Pain point #2, toast.
Before Wistia, my executive team asked me how many views on our YouTube videos came from inside the building. With Wistia, I can exclude my local IP traffic, eliminating a majority of local plays from showing up in my metrics. (So good!)
Wistia shows you how many times the video was played, which prospects viewed it and when, how much of the video they watched, and even allows you to assign lead scores to their behavior.
Video playbacks deserve to be rewarded, scored
As a proud recent subscriber to Pardot, I can now give bonus points to the lead score of my prospects who watch more than 75% of any given video (they're more engaged, darn it!).
Plus I can pull these viewers through, adding an email subscription box to the beginning, middle or end of any video, add a hyperlink to any page on my website, and more.
If you're a modern marketer who's serious about measuring the return on investment (ROI) on your video assets, and hosting these important assets on a rock solid service that makes embedding a breeze, Wistia is your go-to solution.
Useful Education: Video Production 101
But as I preach here at The Useful Marketer, it's not enough just to have a disruptive product to offer your customers. And Wistia has that in spades.
The Wistia team is also passionate about being useful and helpful to potential clients.
If you're brand new to video production, the Wistia team is happy to show you how to set up an office video production studio for a few hundred dollars. And they'll teach you what to buy to light your subjects, how to pick a great microphone, and more.
Tap their education section to get started here.
Talk about building a company full of useful marketers. Wistia's team is all about being useful from stem to stern. From the ground up.
YouTube, thanks for getting the ball rolling on inexpensive video hosting. Wistia is here to take the baton to the next logical step for marketing professionals.
Useful tools, tips, tactics for modern marketers.