Richard van den Boogaard from ReelSEO wrote an in-depth analysis where he examined what’s best for your video marketing campaign: should the video behosted (on your own site) or posted on video platforms like YouTube?The article, written in 2009 was relevant for what was going on at the time, and his conclusion was that it is more advantageous to post your video on sites like YouTube and embed it on your site (embedding means simply copying the HTML code YouTube automatically generates so visitors will see the YouTube video on your site). The criteria that he used to reach his conclusion were:
- Price
- Traffic
- SEO
- Disk space
- Ease of sharing
But that was years ago when analyzing the performance of your video was a complicated job due to lack of in-depth analytics. Luckily, these days we have a few companies to choose from; companies that offers free and paid hosting solutions, in depth analytics, in depth viewer’s behavior (like heatmaps), SEO strategies and enough disk space for all your needs.So whatever business you may have you really need just 2 things: Youtube and a Professional Hosting Platform. Unless you are a Learning business (like Lynda or Udemy) who may need a special video platform – this article is for you.
Why do you need Youtube?
Because it’s the largest video platform in the world and it’s owned by Google. Google is the king of the online, Youtube is the king of the videos. You need to be in the same kingdom. By doing a great job on Youtube chances are that you’ll get in top searches on Google for your specific keyword.Google often like to display Youtube videos on the first page results but I rarely saw a Dailymotion or Vimeo video. It’s crazy that even the competition has a Youtube Account
Why do you need a Professional Hosting Platform?
Because you need to see how good your video actually is! A professional hosting platform allows you to see exactly what ‘X’ viewer from ‘X’ country actually did when he watched your video! This is possible through heatmaps. If 6 from 10 viewers close your video after 20 seconds, you are able to see this and you can start immediately to take action (improve your video, change something in the script and so on…)More than that, they come with marketing tools that will make your life easier: Email Collectors and Call to Actions.We did our research and we found only 2 good hosting platforms: Wistia and Sprout Video. We actually use Wistia and we can say that that’s the best you can get but definitely check Sprout for a head to head comparison.From now on, we’ll take the role of educating you. The first step is to make you aware about the best places for your video and we really think that regardless of your business you need YouTube; you somehow need to attract that massive traffic to your website.Inside your website you have to control everything, that’s why you need a professional hosting platform and other tools that can help you to track everything. Then you need to analyze the results and constantly update your presentations. By presentations I understand everything that’s on your website: the videos, the headlines, the content, the pictures, the buttons and even YOUR PRODUCT!A great video is never enough if everything else is not working right.