Find out why we love using Vidyard to host all our videos, measure their impact and integrate them into our email, content, and digital marketing strategies below.
*This post was originally written by Tayla Fagan and published on 4 June2021
What is Video Marketing?
Video marketing is a digital strategy that leverages the power of video to attract, engage, and convert an audience into prospects or customers.
Sometimes referred to as video content marketing, businesses are increasingly using video in every part of the marketing funnel to reach audiences throughout the customer journey.
We offer Vidyard training for you and your team. Get in touch with us to chat more about our video selling training program.
Benefits of video marketing
Video has been proven to increase traffic, engagement, and conversions. Video is critical to your content strategy because it’s bite-sized, memorable, and measurable. These aren’t just the components that make it perfect for your audience who crave short, engaging pieces, but they’re also the features that make video every marketer’s ideal content format.
You can use video on your website to teach complex concepts, share stories about your customers, and inspire marketing-specific actions (things like demos, trials, subscriptions, and more).
Aside from video’s unique ability to convert like no other, the medium has become especially valuable to data-driven marketers. This is because you can track and measure audience engagement for video meaningfully.
You can tie your videos directly to the deals they’re helping to influence and you can see which assets are actually resonating based on content engagement analytics. This is the reporting that marketing desperately needs to identify your most engaged leads faster and prove the value of game-changing initiatives.
With video, you can:
- Speed up your company’s revenue growth
- Influence buyers with videos designed to help them make decisions
- Rank higher in search
- Increase traffic to your website
- Get more backlinks to pages with embedded videos
- Improve conversions
- Get more opens and clicks on your email sends
- Boost shares on social media
What is Vidyard?
Vidyard helps you create engaging videos to give presentations to your clients, onboard new customers, keep your teammates in the loop, and much more. Vidyard (a partner of iGoMoon) is a video hosting and video creation platform that helps businesses tie ROI back to their video content.
Vidyard does this by integrating with a variety of CRM and marketing automation tools including HubSpot, to provide metrics on how your video influences lead quality, pipeline, and customer engagement.
Is converting your viewers into leads a priority on your website? If yes, you need more than just a simple video player to embed on your pages. What you need is the technology behind a video player that can help you to convert your prospects, nurture your leads, and close more deals.
This is an important consideration to make as you look into video hosts. Do you simply want a video player or do you want a tool that helps you generate more traffic, leads, and sales?
All your videos in one place
Many companies that have started to leverage video to grow their business find themselves at this point, trying to determine what video hosting is right for them. They probably have a few videos embedded on their website using a WordPress plugin, and maybe some sales videos on YouTube that their sales team drop into their emails. They might even have a couple of Vimeo videos on their landing pages. The bottom line - there's no consolidation of data.
With a great video host like Vidyard, you can oversee all of your content in one place, customize your thumbnails, and test to improve views. Vidyard ensures that all the data from the videos you send in emails, post on YouTube, and embed on your website ends up in one place.
If you’re passionate about using media in your marketing efforts, you need a solution to manage that media. A video host is much more than a video player - it’s a video management and optimization tool, and a long-term partner in your journey toward becoming the most trusted educator in your industry and, ultimately, closing more deals.
Vidyard vs. YouTube
At first glance, you may think YouTube and Vidyard do the same thing. YouTube and Vidyard both help you get in front of your audience - which is true - but at some point, organizations that are serious about embracing a culture of video wonder when it's time to take the leap from YouTube for video marketing to a paid hosting option like Vidyard.
We're not saying YouTube is dead. There is a place for both YouTube and Vidyard in your content strategy and they each serve a unique purpose. YouTube isn't just a video hosting platform, it's a social network, and being owned by Google, it's also a powerful search engine.
There are two issues using YouTube to generate leads from your video content:
- You're competing for the viewer's attention and you can lose your viewer's interest quickly.
- There are no forms or CTA on YouTube. You could have 100,000+ views on a video, but you still will be very unlikely to capture anyone's information.
Ultimately, you want to get people back to your website where you have control over the conversation - because when they watch videos on your website, you're the one calling the shots.
That's where Vidyard comes in
Vidyard enables you with calls-to-action and forms you can embed right in your videos. Just like a contact converting on a form in HubSpot, you can see who your viewers are by their real name and how they interact with your content.
Your videos aren't competing for attention with loud advertisements or video messages from other companies. Yes, you have to pay for Vidyard, but what you get back is the ability to create personalized experiences and have more meaningful sales conversations as a result of video.
Video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo are a great place to educate your prospects. You should put all your greatest top-of-the-funnel content for viewers who have realized they have a problem. They might not be ready to visit a website just yet, so meet them where they are. Sure you can’t see who they are, but now they’ll know who you are.
If you don't have a video hosting solution like Vidyard in place for those website videos, you're going to lose out on countless opportunities to convert leads, identify leads by name, and the ability to close more deals faster.
Download our free guide to learn more about how you can work efficiently with Vidyard and HubSpot.
