Traditional Video Hosting Versus New Gen Video Platforms

Using video is more than just a great way to help you tell your story and engage your audience. It can be a strategic driver of value across your entire business. But even if you have the best video content, failing to choose a video platform that’s suited to your business goals will mean that the value of video remains locked away.

My name is Jeff Gadway and in this Chalk Talk, we’ll discuss the differences between traditional video hosting and new generation video platforms and which makes the most sense for you based on your business’ needs.

The old vs. the new

As more businesses adopt video, a growing number of options have become available when it comes to video platforms. You can loosely group them into two categories, traditional video hosting solutions and new generation video platforms. Both have their merits and could be viable options for your business so we’re gonna take a closer look at each one. First up, our traditional video hosting solutions like YouTube and Vimeo. These services offer basic hosting, management, and measurement of video content. They’ll let you embed your content on your website and do a good job of playing it back on desktop and mobile devices. When it comes to measurement, they offer basic analytics like video engagement or viewer demographics at an aggregate level. Traditional video hosting is great for businesses that are just getting started with video, for those that simply need basic hosting and playback, or for those in B2C markets using video purely as a brand tool and way to engage audiences on YouTube. But for businesses looking to embrace video as an integrated part of how they go to market, traditional video hosting isn’t equipped to meet their changing needs. A growing number of businesses are looking to video as a way to generate better business results like generating new educated leads from their existing content libraries, improving conversion rates by qualifying leads based on video consumption, improving engagement with content, your website, email campaigns, all through personalized and interactive content experiences, or maybe booking more meetings with personal video emails in selling and prospecting, boosting employee engagement with secure video communications, and ultimately demonstrating ROI by linking video engagement with close revenue and employee productivity.

New generation video platforms are better suited to these goals. Why? Simply put, they’re better equipped with more capabilities than traditional video hosting in three key areas. First, they’re designed to help businesses create and optimize high performance content. Second, they allow businesses to leverage a broad suite of distribution channels more effectively. And last, they track valuable insights on videos, channels, individual viewers, that help businesses to make smarter decisions and optimize business results. We’re gonna dive in to each one of these three areas in more detail and contrast the differences between traditional video hosting and new generation video platforms.

As a business’ video library grows, YouTube often breaks down as a tool to manage their content. Now, new generation video platforms allow you to easily manage your video content in bulk, update your videos without having to re-embed them across the web, and more efficiently manage your growing library with role-based administration and secure enterprise workflows.

Interactive content = More sales opportunities

The last thing you ever want your video to do is fade to black or take your viewer away from your brand, but that’s exactly what happens today with traditional video hosting tools. With new generation video platforms, you can add rich interactive elements like lead generation forms or choose your own adventure experiences that generate new leads, help to keep audiences more engaged, and move viewers through the buying journey. Now, imagine getting a video with your name on it or that includes your email or company right inside. Some new generation video platforms offer personalization capabilities that bring the viewer right into the video itself. This leads to higher conversion rates, longer engagement with your content, and more sales opportunities.

Cut through the noise with User-generated Content

Audiences are being drawn to more and more user-generated content. It’s more authentic and a better way to communicate with your audience. Some new generation video platforms offer tools that make it easy for anyone in your business to create and share webcam and stream recording videos. These can be a great way for your sales team to cut through the noise and book more meetings, for your support team to answer questions and improve the customer experience through more human interaction, or for anyone in your business for that matter to share ideas or deliver a message using the power of video.

Choosing your distribution channels

First up, we’re gonna talk about multi-channel distribution. If the only place you want your video to live is on YouTube, then managing your video with a traditional video hosting platform is probably easy enough, but traditional video hosting platforms can break down as you want to extend your video across channels. New generation video platforms make it easy to publish, update, and manage your content across multiple channels all at the same time like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your website, and more, all from one single spot, makes it super easy. Speaking of your website, traditional video hosting tools make it really easy to add your video to a webpage, but that’s about it. Only new generation video platforms help you use video to actually improve your SEO ranking by properly indexing all the metadata from your video and driving search results back to your website. If this is something you’re interested in, we’ve got a whole other Chalk Talk dedicated to this topic alone so go on and check it out.

Beyond using video to communicate externally with customers and prospects, many businesses are now looking to use video as a way to engage with employees or to communicate with partners. Key here is being able to secure your content  With tools like SSO and Secure Playback, new generation video platforms offer the ability to restrict viewing to intended audiences only. This is really important. Also, many organizations are looking to include video in their customer emails or existing communications workflows like a sales automation platform for example or a customer success tool. New generation video solutions make it easy to bring video into those experiences or to email to make video more accessible, easier to use, and ultimately more valuable for your business.

Pinpoint Insights

While traditional video hosting tools will often show you some basic video performance insights overall, only new generation platforms dive much deeper showing you how different channels are performing relative to one another so that you can optimize your distribution strategy. Another benefit of new generation video platforms is that it can provide audience insights right down to the individual viewer level. This means you can track videos an individual has watched and how long they stayed tuned in to each one. Integrations, by pushing video data and video consumption or individual viewer engagement into systems of record like marketing automation or CRM, new generation video platforms can enrich your lead qualification, improve your segmentation, and help you build better nurture programs that move prospects further down the funnel faster.

And all of that leads to this right here, ROI and attribution. New generation video platforms help you connect the dots between video consumption and influence revenue. This ultimately allows you to understand and better demonstrate the impact that video is having on key business KPIs. As you’ve heard, there are lots of considerations to bear in mind as you choose between a traditional video hosting solution and a new generation video platform. I hope you feel better equipped to go out there and look at the different options and make the choice that best meets your business’ needs.

My name is Jeff Gadway, and this has been a Vidyard Chalk Talk.

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