YouTube is undoubtedly the world’s most popular video social network. Besides, it is de-facto the second largest search engine with more than 1 billion users and 3 billion searches per month. Without a doubt, YouTube is just amazing to expose video content and gain some brand visibility.
With 32% of U.S. businesses planning to increase their spending on videos and podcasts in 2016, more and more marketing professionals are paying attention to alternative video hosting platforms with focus on customization, branding, SEO, social media optimization, and lead generation. What makes a difference between YouTube and business video hosting and why is diversifying your marketing effort between the two platforms is worth the game? Let’s figure out.
Making Embedded Video Look and Work Great on Your Website
Video embedded from YouTube can be customized in a few pretty basic ways: you can choose whether or not to show video title, player controls, and suggested videos. This can be quite enough when you simply want to embed a single video to a blog post. But using video on a business website or landing page, especially when you need to present a product or service, requires extended customization capabilities.
It is believed that video can help to increase website traffic by 55%. More than that, viewers are 64-85% more likely to buy a product or a service after watching a video. So, in order to fully embrace this huge marketing potential video must be fully integrated with custom website design, keep user engagement at the highest level, retain maximum traffic, and motivate users to certain actions.
However, embedding video from YouTube to the website is not always a good idea. While YouTube is a great source of referral traffic and businesses should definitely invest in publishing and promoting videos there, embedded YouTube player on your website can lead traffic away from it. We advise using a video player based on a dedicated business video platform on your website which is designed to maximize traffic, increase engagement and generate leads for you.
What’s the solution?
There can be no one-size-fits-all solution, of course, but here’s a number of ways to extend marketing potential with video:
- Full screen and background video
Full screen and background videos are among the hottest trends in website design. They engage a user at first sight and help to tell a brand’s story. Check out these 20 beautiful examples of full screen video published on various websites. Adding beautiful background effects will make your design even more eye-catching. Background video player can have buttons and controls, pagination to display multiple video files, playlist, and more.
- Autoplay video
Autoplaying videos om your website can make sense when you need to grab viewers’ attention right from the start. This video mode can work in a pretty much similar way to how videos work in Facebook feed. The video can start playing right after the web page is loaded. You can optionally mute videos on start. Autoplay is paused when the user scrolls the page down. Many businesses and media publishers are following Facebook’s lead by enabling autoplay feature on their websites.
- Video timeline
Several videos which are logically related to each other will look great on a website when organized into a timeline. This format is perfect to support online courses, portfolios, and product presentations. Video timeline can contain multiple features like autoplay, video loop, shuffle, pagination, beautifully looking playlist adjusted to custom website design, search field, etc.
- Always-on-top video
Marketers are always looking for new ways to keep people engaged with content. Always-on-top video is helpful to increase viewing time considerably since the video is played during the entire session, regardless of whether or not the user is scrolling the web page. At the same time, the user retains full control over the video and is able to stop playing it anytime.
- Video portal
If you own a business, why not use online video to showcase it effectively to everyone? Add a video portal to your website where you can feature multiple videos in the most creative way. Business video hosting usually comes with multiple ready-to-go design templates to address basically all kinds of needs. Why host videos on your own server, pay for design & development, or use the limited interface of YouTube, when you can create a fully custom video portal in a matter of minutes with only a few clicks and publish it online by simply copying and pasting the code to the web page?
Moving Your Video Marketing to the Next Level
According to the Content Marketing Research taken in 2015, more than 72% of B2B marketers are using YouTube to promote their videos. We can’t ignore the fact that YouTube videos have certain advantages in Google search, and it sounds quite natural considering the fact that YouTube is actually owned by Google. Besides, YouTube is a huge video search engine itself with billions of views per day. Therefore, having your videos there is essential to reach the largest video audience in the world, which is located on this platform.
Along with that, alternative video hosting platforms are constantly working on integration with new SEO, marketing, and lead generation tools, thus making themselves more and more effective for business.
- SEO fields and tags
SEO fields allow to specify the name and description for a video asset or an entire video gallery. They are included in the video embed code along with SEO tags helping search engines to crawl the content and rank it higher. Note that this search traffic will go to your own site where the video is embedded, not to an external platform.
- Lead generation
There can be many ways to generate leads with video, among which are email collection forms, custom links and call-to-action buttons.
- Branding
With business video hosting, you own the video player and can customize it to the full extent. This can be done by modifying the video player’s CSS code directly or by using the visual editor. So, if your goal is to expose your brand adding a logo or watermark with a link to your website directly into video will be a good idea.
- Social media integration
What’s great about the custom video player is that social sharing buttons are embedded with the video, and you can choose whether to display or to hide them, customize their look, and select the desired social networks.
Potecting your content
Although videos cannot be downloaded from YouTube directly, there exist multiple browser extensions and plugins helping to grab the video. To make sure your videos can be viewed on the specified list of websites where you decide to show them, it can make sense to set right-click protection and domain lock for the video player that is used to embed video on the website.
Conclusion
YouTube is the world’s largest video social network and the second largest search engine. This platform is just awesome to promote video and to gain some brand visibility. Business video hosting should be used with websites and blogs in order to provide extensive customization, security, and marketing capabilities.
The post YouTube Vs Business Video Hosting appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Email Marketing Tips.
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