When should businesses upgrade their video marketing beyond free platforms? This two part series explains the 7 signs that it’s time for a more sophisticated approach.
At Brightcove, we recommend a blended distribution strategy between YouTube and your own online video platform. We will delve into best practices of this blended approach in later blog posts. For now, it’s important to understand when you’ve hit the tipping point for maturing your YouTube strategy into a full-fledged video marketing strategy.
In part 1 of this series, we explained the first three signs that it’s time to upgrade your video marketing to an online video platform.
Here are the final four of the 7 common signs you need to move your video marketing beyond YouTube:
4. Your “private” video content on YouTube is being shared far and wide.
You have video that you don’t want to be released to the general public; possibly it’s for internal consumption only, or for franchisees, or distributors, or any other select audience. You upload the sensitive content to YouTube and mark the video as “unlisted” or “private,” and then embed it back in your organization’s intranet or list it in another “private” manner. A few days later, you notice people viewing that content outside of the “firewall” and that those unlisted YouTube videos are not protected after all.
Why an OVP works well:
- You can publish a video that is held secure behind a firewall and only accessible via single sign on or IP restriction. Investigate exactly what options the particular OVP offers and what security rating it holds.
- Some OVPs offer secure sign on for the video portals as well, allowing even public portals to offer some video content only behind a secure firewall.
5. You hear reports that your videos are not playing for your company’s prospects and customers, only to discover those people are viewing from sites that block YouTube, social media, and other non-business sites.
You’re a B2B or B2C marketer and you’re excited by the prospect of seeing the increase in marketing effectiveness promised by marketing research stats. Unfortunately, you find that your videos on YouTube are blocked by some of the businesses you hope to bring on as customers, or they’re blocked by the employer firewalls of consumers you’re hoping to reach. Or worse, you discover that the YouTube videos of your global company are blocked in certain geographic locations (like the entire country of China). Now, instead of viewing your content in the most effective medium, prospects and customers are seeing an error message in your player and it appears that your site is broken.
Simply put, companies and governments don’t block online video platforms. You can be assured that your video will play for your business or consumer audiences anywhere and on any device.
6. You have to update your video content and every time you do, you start with a blank slate losing all likes, shares, and comments.
You have successful video content that has garnered wonderful ratings and comments helpful to your content goals. You need to make a small change to your video, but 90% of the content remains the same. YouTube considers the updated version of the video to be a new asset, so you lose all your likes and comments, as well as other important historical details. If you’re in a highly regulated industry, this happens frequently and the value of your marketing is diminished.
OVPs allow you to replace an asset with an updated version while retaining the same identification information. So a single change to one video will instantly change that asset version wherever you have published that video from your platform. All information associated with that asset remains intact.
7. You are spending way too much time problem-solving and learning new web dev/IT/DIY skills every time there is an issue with your video performance, or an exec wants to do something exciting and new with video marketing.
You are having issues with the video playing on your site. Your execs have noticed that a competitor’s video content is being listed in the related content at the end of your new video. There are other performance issues. Who you gonna call? More likely, what online form do you need to hunt down and when will someone get back with you?
This is what some refer to as “the high cost of free”. When you are a customer of a professional business-focused platform, you have 24/7 customer support. You have account managers and other people with whom you have a personal connection. They’re invested in your success. There is definitely the peace of mind brought by simple mitigation of issues. More importantly, over time, you have customer success support to help you build the exact video marketing model you have envisioned, whether it has existed before or is something completely new.
If you are looking to create an effective video marketing strategy, you will likely find that your marketing has moved past just putting your videos on YouTube. It’s time to take a look at a solution that will maximize your investment in video and provide opportunities to shorten sales cycles through more meaningful personalized journeys. It’s time to graduate to an online video platform.
Avoid 5 common video marketing mistakes!