Our digital lifestyle has grown incredibly quickly. Get this: 2019 is the last year for Yellow Pages’ new publication.
That means most people no longer use physical telephone books anymore — then again, why would they? They could store thousands of contacts in their smartphones and look someone up real quick instead of having to turn hundreds of pages.
A similar thing is also happening to digital videos, namely movies and TV shows. According to the data from Flexible, the number of TV shows on Netflix in 2018 reached 1,596 titles, from only 530 in 2010.
It indicates that the demand for digital and on-the-go video content is rising quickly, and brands are jumping onto the bandwagon to keep in touch with their customers. You should be too!
There are so many social media sites, apps, and digital platforms where people are spending their time. Choosing which video marketing platform to use could be a real challenge.
This article will talk about 5 of the most prominent video marketing platforms that you should consider for your brand. But before we jump into that, let’s get something clear: video marketing platform ≠video hosting sites.
Video Hosting Sites vs. Video Marketing Platform
You can upload your videos directly into WordPress or other hosting services like HostGator — but if you ask any marketer who is worth their salt, they’d say that’s a bad idea.
Video marketing revolves around publishing videos, promoting them to different channels, and measuring the relevant metrics to see which aspect of the video needs improvement.
Channels are where the difference between a video hosting service and a video marketing platform lies.
With a video hosting service, you’ll get exactly just that: a place for your videos. With video marketing platforms, you’ll get more features like integration to other platforms, managed storage, and sets of analytics data that could translate to business decisions.
Here is the list of Video Marketing Platforms
Now, which video marketing platform should you choose? We’ve rounded up 6 of the best video marketing platforms available in 2019 to help you make that decision.
1) YouTube
Account Types: Free
Pricing: Nill
When we talk about videos, it’s almost impossible not to talk about YouTube. It’s arguably the largest video-based platform on the Internet. Whatever kind of video you want to find, chances are you could find them on YouTube.
Notable Features:
- Integration with Google Analytics.
- Embed Codes for easy integration to websites.
- Social Signal to measure engagements.
- Top-notch search algorithm.
- Integrated advertising option (Google Ads).
- One-for-all user account (Google, Gmail, Analytics, Search Console, etc.).
2) Vimeo
Account Types: Free, Paid
Pricing: $0-$75/mo.
Vimeo is the aesthetically attractive cousin to YouTube. Vimeo has reportedly taken a bite of YouTube’s market dominance with 715 million views every month with its niche audience and sleek interface.
Vimeo’s aesthetic appeal in every part of its website appeals to specific groups of audience, e.g., motion designers, illustrators, and animation studios. It practically rotates around the idea of sound filmmaking and inspiring videos.
If you have those two in your brand vision, then Vimeo is the platform for you. However, that doesn’t mean Vimeo lacks valuable features.
Notable Features
- No advertising in your videos, even with free plans.
- Built-in social media integrations.
- An option to sell/rent your videos.
- Privacy settings for premium users.
- Technical support with their paid packages.
- Vimeo’s smaller and more community-driven.
- Minimum competition with other creators (compared to YouTube).
3) Wistia
Account Types: Free, Paid
Pricing: $0-$99+/mo
Wistia is a platform that is designed with businesses as their core users. It offers video heatmaps and complete control over the branding for the videos embedded on your website.
Wistia offers a generous room for customizability — you can add social media share buttons, integrated marketing tools, crowdfunding animation video, and put various branding options in your videos.
Videos that are hosted on Wistia have native Twitter integration. It means that Wista-hosted videos are watchable within the tweet without having to open up a pop-up player.
With an analytics package, you’ll get the heatmap for each view of your videos. This point lets you know which section of the video people watch or skip the most. This insight helps analyze and optimize your videos.
It’s worth noting that with the free plan, you’ll get to upload only three videos every month and the basic Wistia features. With the Pro plan, you will be limited to 10 videos every month — but with an extra 25c, you can upload as many videos as you like.
There is also an advanced plan which It can customize to meet your needs. The pricing for this plan is presumably unique for each user.
Notable Features
- Advanced Analytics, which includes id tracking and engagement metrics.
- Batch video uploads.
- Bulk video management settings.
- Universal hosted video playback with comments & moderation.
- Advanced HTML5-based video player with Flash.
- Advanced video metadata management.
- Customizable video player, with templates and widgets available.
- Playlists that it can assign to specific video players.
- Video security features include IP allow listing and password protection.
- Email gating for lead generation.
- Integration with various marketing and CRM platforms.
4) Vidyard
Account Types: Free, Paid
Pricing: $150-$2,000+/mo. (marketing plans); $0-$80+/mo. (sales plans)
Vidyard is not a free platform, but it’s a rising contender in the video marketing platform scene. The first impression that many people get from Vidyard is that it provides a niche video product for sales and marketing purposes — and that it charges a hefty price.
Granted, it takes a little bit more time to set up everything correctly. However, once everything is up and running, it can offer well-optimized and streamlined sales and marketing campaigns.
The premium price tag that Vidyard puts on their services offers what a premium video hosting platform should: unbranded video player, no ads, auto-encoding, social share buttons, custom thumbnails, and video engagement analytics.
But those are the features that you can find on cheaper services, right?
Vidyard takes it a step farther. It provides individual viewer-level tracking and analytics, complete with a whole set of video marketing tools that allows you to do A/B testing for multiple video thumbnails, generates leads, and test a variety of CTA’s.
Notable Features
- Video hosting, upload videos and create a video player embedded in an email or website.
- Batch upload video content
- Manage video thumbnails
- The video player has Flash Fallback
- Create and design a branded video player, change color, size, etc.
- Engagement analytics, including contact tracking
- Social media and marketing integrations
- Salesforce.com integration and app
5) SproutVideo
Account Types: Paid
Pricing: $59.99-$499.99/mo.
SproutVideo is an easy-to-use video marketing platform for small to medium businesses. Its intuitive user interface makes uploading videos a one-click task.
It allows you to add a custom branded video player, security measures, and track analytics data such as views and engagements. And of course, it also enables you to publish a video to a website via embed codes or playlists.
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Sprout designed its platform with marketers in mind—the analytics provided by their built-in tool drills down right to the individual level. The heatmap feature helps marketers determine which point in the video viewers stopped watching and where they started watching again.Â
Notable Features
- Customize the colors and playback behavior of your video player.
- Include post-video CTA for lead generation.
- Create an embeddable video playlist.
- Video views and engagement data for both embedded videos and playlists.
- A set of optimization tools to help with the creation of video site maps.
- HTML5-based video player to support both desktop and mobile devices.
- Change the privacy options for your videos — including multiple-login tracking and password protection.
- Restrict domains in which videos can be embedded and played.
- Use SSL embedding in protected pages or applications that require encryption.
6) Brightcove
Account Types: Paid
Pricing: $199 (marketing), $499 (enterprise), custom (monetization)
Brightcove is a suite of video hosting and marketing tools specifically designed for businesses. Unlike other paid video marketing platforms, Brightcove offers monetization options for your videos.
Are you confused? Let me explain.
Brightcove online video solutions categorize into two separate groups: Media and Brands.
Brightcove Media is targeted towards media, content publishers, distributors, and individual creators who want to engage and earn off their videos. Brightcove Brands is more focused on the marketing aspects of your videos, which includes analytics and other helpful information which it can use to improve content delivery at every stage of the customer journey.
Brightcove allows users to customize their video players, embedded to websites and social media sites. There is also a live streaming feature included in the packages — with fifteen different player templates to choose from.
To show their effort towards making a global video marketing platform, each of these templates is available in six different languages.
It also provides YouTube sync, an excellent time-saving feature as it links the videos automatically to YouTube, which helps offer a broader range.
Notable Features
- HTML5-based lightweight video player.
- Customizable video player with the use of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
- Native player Standard Development Kit (SDK)
- CRM and MAP integrations.
- Interactive video players that allow you to add user interaction to your videos.
Choosing The Right Video Marketing Platform
These video marketing platforms are all great — they have their selling points and weaknesses that make them unique to each other.
Let’s assume you are doing video marketing to build a brand and generate more leads. To choose the right video marketing platform, you should consider these factors:
- Lead generation feature to create your email list.
- Customizability for branding purposes.
- Analytics tool and possible integrations with third-party tools.
- Their cost in comparison to your video marketing budget.
