Change The Channel: Why Your Videos Need a New Home

In the beginning, there was YouTube. Well, close to the beginning. The world started in 2005, right?

Okay, maybe not. The world has been around for a while, and online video was nothing new in 2005. That said, while YouTube wasn’t the first site to feature video on the internet, it did change the way video existed online. It created an entirely new channel for marketers, amateur singers, hilarious backyard shenanigans, and big businesses to feature online content.

But what happens now, a mere 11 years later, when YouTube has over one billion users, and well over one billion videos?

While it’s good to have your content on YouTube, your prospects’ eyes are competing with hundreds of other videos in your category alone. Chances are, they’re going to click on another video on YouTube once yours is done — at best, it’s one of yours. Worst case scenario, it’s a pug playing the piano, or a competitor’s video on a similar topic. YouTube is still a very important channel for getting eyes on your video content, but it’s best used as a way to drive people back to your website. Once they’re there, you need to keep them on it.

That’s why more and more companies are choosing to build their own private YouTube. They’re turning off the external noise, bringing their videos home, keeping viewers on their site, and branding the experience. It’s time for marketers to change the channel. Here are a few examples to show you why:

Lone Wolf Technologies

Real estate isn’t always a sexy industry behind the scenes. Outside of the home-flipping TV shows and smiling faces on the lawn signs, the nitty gritty details of buying, selling, and managing home sales is a messy blend of paperwork, signatures, and legal documents.

Smart brokerages are moving towards digital solutions, and Lone Wolf Technologies is leading the pack. But how do you educate real estate agents and brokerages on how to use new technology quickly and efficiently? The short answer is video — the long answer is well-organized video tutorials that are succinct and don’t waste anyone’s time.

Lone Wolf’s video hub is a shining example of what a support hub can be. Videos are organized by the technology that agents or brokers use, and newcomers can quickly and easily find the exact video that solves their problem. A new agent looking to add your first listing? That’s easy to search for. Broker looking to add a new agent to your system? That’s here too.

All of this content could exist on YouTube, but with the deluge of real estate related content floating around, it’s easy for a prospect, or even an existing customer, to get lost in a YouTube ‘black hole’ and find themselves six degrees of separation away from their original question. With Lone Wolf’s video hub, once you’ve finished watching a support video, the only other content you see is more support videos. Win-win.

Influitive Advocamp

So, you’ve run your event, all of the attendees had a great time, you turned a few attendees into customers, and a few customers into advocates. Your work here is done, right?

Wrong! All those sessions you recorded are your new best content assets — and having a private channel you can tie into your event page is the key to getting the most out of them. Advocamp, Influitive’s incredible advocate marketing conference, pressed record on every session at their 2016 event, and their video hub is the next best thing to being there.

Advocamp organized their content into keynote streams, shorter one-person talks, streams around content, and featured videos from their hilarious pre-event campaign.

Having all of this event content organized in one place means attendees can quickly and easily find the videos of sessions they attended and share them with colleagues. It also means that non-attendees can experience the same content (minus the networking, free food, and celebrity hob-knobbing) and get pumped up for next year’s event.

Vocera

Video marketing isn’t just for tech companies and Nerf guns anymore — literally every industry is benefitting from the engaging power of video, and healthcare is on the forefront of this.

Vocera is a company that straddles the line of technology and health care. Their platform for internal hospital communications is designed to provide critical information to the right people at the right time, in a variety of complex situations.

Explaining this complexity isn’t easy — unless you’re using video. Vocera’s video library features everything from in-depth customer testimonials, short segments on individual functionalities, and an entire library about different applications for their key communication products.

Keeping this content organized and accessible on YouTube wouldn’t be easy, but customizing the video experience for viewers with a video hub means that Vocera can create relevant channels that appeal to specific customers, and put the right product data into the hands of the right people at the right time. Seems pretty in line with their core mission!

Act-On

The final company you should be learning from is Act-On. Boasting an impressive 3,000 customers, Act-On is a major player in the marketing automation space, and uses video to educate their customers on a host of important topics.

Their most impressive channel is their 15 Minute Marketer, in which they teach an in-depth marketing topic in 15 minutes or less. That may sound like a daunting task, but by being concise, looking at complex topics with simple solutions, and sticking to the formula, this series is making a big splash with marketers.

On top of that, Act-On has another channel dedicated to on-demand webinars, which they use a pre-roll email gate to collect lead information. While YouTube allows for some pretty in-depth annotations to direct viewers back to your website, or to other content, self-hosting your video is the only way to really collect true lead data before someone can watch. And if you’re asking people to fill in their contact details before they watch a live webinar, you should definitely be doing it for the recorded version as well.

Act-On’s video hub features support content, informative thought leadership videos, and on-demand webinars all organized in one simple, easy to navigate space. YouTube would just be holding them back.

Are You Ready to Change the Channel?

Self-hosted video hubs aren’t for everyone — you’ll notice that most of the businesses featured here have more than one or two videos, and are tracking metrics well beyond view counts.

If you’re working with a large library of video, and not seeing any traffic coming your way from YouTube, it may be time to start building your own internal channel. What you lose in the ‘subscription’ model of YouTube, you gain in brand recognition, customization, and control of what content your viewers see when your video is done.

Interested in learning more about how you can organize your content to create great video experiences for your audience? Click here to learn more about Vidyard Video Hubs, and see a few in action!

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