Brands understand that it is no longer an option to include a video marketing strategy in promoting their business.
However, what has changed is the importance of uploading and sharing videos on additional platforms and channels in addition to YouTube.
For example, according to HubSpot research, video has dominated social media. 62% of surveyed consumers want to learn from videos they watch on social media.
The Numbers Do Not Lie
Video must be part of your marketing campaign efforts. Take a look at some of the video marketing statistics below if you still have any doubts.
- 94% of video marketers cite video as increasing user understanding of their brand offering.
- According to Cisco, by 2022, videos will be over 82% of all consumer internet traffic.
- 84% of people say that they have been convinced to buy the brand's product or service by watching a company's video.
- In 2020, 83% of US internet users accessed digital video content.
To leverage the power of video for lead generation, explaining products and services, boosting email marketing, and selling your offerings, you must use a quality video hosting platform.
There are numerous free hosting platforms available for your videos, with YouTube being the most popular. YouTube has more than 2 billion users, which is approximately one-third of the Internet.
There is no question that you should upload your videos to YouTube, given its popularity. However, there is a vast difference between hosting your videos on YouTube and adequately promoting them to reach your target audience.
When growing your brand and increasing brand awareness, it is vital to look at alternate quality platforms that can offer different methods to promote your videos.
While YouTube will always be a heavily pursued distribution channel for B2B marketers because of its high engagement rates, other platforms offer additional features and functionality that make it easy to promote your videos, track their performance, customize video players, and analyze data.
What Makes a Great Video Marketing Platform?
No platform is suitable for all businesses. It depends upon your company's needs, budget, and required functionality. When searching for the best and most reliable video marketing platforms, consider the following characteristics and features:
- The platform infrastructure
- Monetization
- Live streaming capability
- Cost
- Quality and depth of analytics
- Storage and bandwidth limits
- User-friendliness
- Need to sign a contract?
- Does it offer a free trial?
The best video marketing platform for your company gives you control over how and where viewers see your videos.
Below are several available platforms from which to choose.
1. Vimeo
Vimeo Plans
Vimeo is an excellent choice for growing businesses. The free version offers plenty of video editing features and basic analytics. You can start with the free version and upgrade to one of the paid tiers as your needs for additional functionality increase.
Vimeo's paid platforms are Plus, Pro, Business, Premium, and Enterprise. One of the most helpful features Vimeo offers, when compared to YouTube, is the ability to replace a video without losing the associated stats.
Why Vimeo?
There's nothing worse than uploading, embedding, and sharing a YouTube video, only to notice that you have made an error after it has been shared all over the Internet.
Your choices are either to hope no one notices or to replace the video and lose all the traffic and social shares you have received.
With Vimeo, you won't have this dilemma. You can re-upload a video and maintain all the stats. The user-friendly interface makes it simple to create engaging videos directly from your computer or mobile device, share them on social media, and embed them on your website.
Use the analytics to determine:
- How people are finding your videos
- Which devices they are using
- Where viewers are located
- At which point in your videos do viewers are dropping off
- How well they are performing on social media
Vimeo Pros
Some of the many pros of using Vimeo as a host for your videos include:
- Ad and commercial-free videos
- User-friendly interface and dashboard
- Seamless embedding and sharing across multiple platforms
- Superior configuration and video management options
- Workflows for collaboration
- The ability to set privacy settings and password protect videos
- Customizable embed features
Vimeo Cons
A few of Vimeo's drawbacks are:
- Pro support is not always responsive
- Pricing models and not very transparent and are somewhat complicated to understand
- It takes time to generate traffic to shared content for marketing campaigns
- The uploading process is often slow
- Costly for the highest premium package
- The search algorithm is not optimal
2. Wave
Wave also has an online video editor and cloud-based hosting services to facilitate publishing, embedding, and sharing your completed videos.
There are three options from which to choose, starting with free. The differences in the pricing tiers include the ability to download in mp4 format (not available in the free version), and:
- The number of embeds permitted
- Editing limit
- Customizable video player (not available in the free version)
- Number of brand presets
The Business tier offers the most robust and feature-rich functions: SEO boosting snippets, multiple user logins, custom domains, automatic captioning, and several other premium features for agencies and businesses.
An additional feature of Wave is the automatic landing page generator for your videos to become a powerful marketing tool.
Wave Pros
Wave has many benefits for its users, including
- Access to music and stock videos
- The ability to edit video clips and add fun elements to them in the timeline
- Intuitive user-interface
- Helpful for small businesses with a limited budget
- Multiple canvas options for various social media platforms
- Useful for short how-to-videos as well as short social media videos
- Large selection of video templates from which to choose
- Intuitive video editor
Wave Cons
A few of the cons associated by Wave users include:
- The inability to adjust the call-to-action options at the end of each video
- Cannot customize the watermark
- Does not work as well in Firefox as it does in Google Chrome
- Video rendering takes too long
- Minimal transition effects
- Audio and video do not always align when reviewing edits
To see if Wave is the right platform for your videos, sign up for a free account that includes unlimited social media native shares, five video embeds, video templates, and basic video editing.
3. SproutVideo
While there is no free version, SproutVideo does offer a free 30-day trial with unlimited access to all features, including:
- Mobile-optimized video websites for all your videos
- Robust privacy controls for secure video sharing
- Integrations with other marketing tools to generate leads and drive traffic
- Custom playlists and video players
- Powerful analytics to track viewer engagement and video performance
The platform has 4 tier options: Seed, Sprout, Tree, Forest. Users are not required to provide payment information when signing up for the free trial.
SproutVideo Pros
Some of the pros of SproutVideo include:
- Comprehensive video analytics
- Powerful security features
- The ability to create custom players and playlists for your videos
- Automatic quality adjustment and bandwidth detection resulting in a smooth viewer playback
- Versatile and responsive embed codes to work with other platforms such as Squarespace, Shopify, and WordPress
- Video password protection capability
- In-player CTAs to catch viewer attention and capture leads
- Video SEO functionality to improve SEO
- Integrations with multiple services such as Zapier, Mailchimp, and HubSpot
SproutVideo Cons
Some SproutVideo users don't like the following:
- Playback caching is sometimes slow, causing the player to pause
- User-interface can be confusing
- When embedding videos, many WordPress themes do not display the videos correctly on mobile and require users to get into the source code
- The cost is higher than other comparable platforms
4. Wistia
Wistia touts itself as a complete hosting platform for marketers by enabling users to see measurable results from videos and podcasts.
Wistia Plans & Pricing
Pricing options range from free to Advanced. The free version comes with all Wistia's standard features, which include:
- Easy sharing and embedding functionality
- A customizable player including color choice and call-to-actions
- Integrations with popular tools such as Mailchimp
- Interactive links that display on your videos
- Video analytics to track how viewers interact with your videos
Wistia’s white-label feature enables users to customize players to match their brand identity and image. To help with SEO, Wistia injects Schema.org mark-up onto the page where your video is embedded.
If you want to use your video for lead generation, Wistia enables users to keep some video content behind a digital gate, acting as a video lead magnet.
Wistia Pros
Below are some of the pros Wistia users enjoy:
- The free version enables users to get an idea of the platform to see if it will suit their needs
- More control over video content
- Helpful and responsive customer support
- Lead generation functionality using digital gates to increase following and leads
- Being able to set videos to autoplay on their channel
- White-label tools for branding
- Robust reporting and analytic features
Wistia Cons
Some complaints from users who have tried Wistia include:
- Premium plans can be costly if you exceed bandwidth limits
- 3rd party integrations are limited
- Analytics on free and lower-cost plans could be more specific and robust
- The user interface is not very intuitive
- Minimal customizations are available
5. Powtoon
Powtoon is a video hosting platform and an all-in-one video marketing platform with everything you need all in one place.
Create multiple types of videos, including:
- Animated
- Video infographics
- Webcam and screen recordings
- Whiteboard tutorials
- Branded characters
Manage:
- Teams and their roles
- Enterprise-grade security
- Collaborative editing
- Comments and approvals
- Your video brand assets
Distribute:
- Download videos as jpg, PDF, MP4, and PPTX
- Publishing on social media channels
- LMS integrations
- Microsoft and Slack tams
- Internal company content hub
PowToon Plans & Pricing
Pricing for individuals ranges from $19/month to $99/month for agencies. There is no free option, but Powtoon does offer a free trial.
Other plans are available for teams, corporate, and enterprise-level accounts with varying features, storage, and functionality. Business users must contact Powtoon to request a quote.
When creating a video, you can choose to customize one of their pre-made professional templates or start from scratch. Once you are finished creating your video and are happy with the results, Powtoon will upload it directly to YouTube for you.
Powtoon Pros
- Creates engaging visuals to attract viewers
- Includes a library of background music
- Intuitive interface ideal for creating videos
- Work is automatically saved
Powtoon Cons
- The paid versions are costly
- Difficult to organize your uploaded images
- Imported video clips are limited to 90 seconds
- The free version includes the Powtoon watermark
- Analytics and reporting are not as extensive as many other platforms
Final Thoughts
While it is hard to resist a price tag of free, there are limitations. A few of them include:
- Driving traffic away from your site
- Suggesting related videos often leads viewers to watch your competitor’s videos
- Flagging your video content or shutting down your channel for a variety of reasons
The above video marketing platforms are only a few of the numerous options available on the market today.
Two of the most significant factors to consider are cost and your priorities. Small businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers may meet their needs with free hosting solutions.
Whereas larger brands often have different priorities and larger budgets to pay for more robust video platforms.
It is essential to define your video marketing goals to determine which solution will work best for you. For example, if you want to run ads and live stream videos, you can narrow down your search to only those platforms that offer these features.
Paid hosting sites that offer a free trial with full functionality will be most helpful to you when deciding if the platform meets your needs.
Do some research and try out several providers for yourself before deciding. You might find that using more than one platform is the ideal solution for your video marketing needs.
Ultimately, the best option for you will depend upon several factors, including your marketing budget, level of experience, and specific features you need, such as analytics and reporting.
