VIDEO DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY AND WHERE TO HOST
Video Distribution strategy is the the upmost important part of marketing your video, apart from having a video that looks and sounds and hits your target markets, you must know where and how you are going to get eyeballs onto your beautiful shiny new video. Deciding what platform to host your video, (YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Ooyala, BrightCove, Vidyard) and what your video distribution plan will look like, should be diligently thought out carefully and planned.
We at Unleashed Productions can create the most amazing video, one that has potential to go viral, but unless there is a solid distribution strategy with a road map of where and how to link and direct traffic then it will just sit, and we would get so sad that we worked so hard to make it beautiful for it to sit there with old China dishes. Definitely not something anyone wants. To my beloved marketing executives; CMO’s Marketing managers and others, here are things to think about before and while your amazing video is being produced.
1. Where to host the video? – No not just Youtube please!!! It should never be your only video host as Youtube has many downfalls: It will always direct traffic to Youtube website and not yours or your landing page. It won’t give you good analytics if any. It will place google advertisements over your video. It won’t let you do any lead generation or calls to action. Its practically putting your wonderful video in prison owned by Google, but the good news is it lets everyone know where you are: SEO.
2. Do you have control over your video? – You should be thinking about a video host that gives you deep analytics on your video performance, like what parts of the video people like most, where your viewers are coming from, where people drop off- Yes you can find out about this stuff! Find a video host that allows you to add calls to action, allows you to collect emails from within the video, allows you to choose your thumbnail and the colors and feel of the video embed. These really do exist: Brightcove and Ooyala are the big boys, Wistia and Vidyard are the younger and cooler little brothers that are in the video hosting space.
3. Do you have a roadmap to direct traffic and a landing page? – Literally we mean a map. Where do you want to direct people with your video? What do you want people to do? How are you going to integrate social media with your video distribution and campaign? The importance of a landing page is ever so crucial in order to get real analytics on the effectiveness of your video campaign and it also allows you to do A and B testing.
4. Did you know that a thumbnail picture can be one of the most influential options you can use to get a viewer to click play? Also when doing a google search or other query a video thumbnail is the top eyeball driver. Your thumbnail is important, so once you have your video, choose or create it wisely. Make it something that would entice a ‘play’.
These are only a few tidbits. There should be a whole course on this as the deeper you go into SEO and analytics the more your learn about how best to distribute your videos. We are more than happy, YES MORE THAN HAPPY, to help in any way with your video distribution so we can get your important videos viewed and shared with the right audience. 50% is having a great video the other 50% is having a great video distribution strategy.
For some weird reason people always ask to see my office, here you go, here is my mess :). Can you find Oscar?
With kindness
Shira
