The Benefits of Video Hosting on Your Website

Video content is taking over the Internet. Several years ago, the place you were most likely to find this kind of content was YouTube, where you could look up any kind of funny, instructional or music video imaginable. Today, you can find Internet videos everywhere you look: Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and news network websites. And according to data, it’s a trend that’s not going away.

In a recent visual networking report done by Cisco, it is estimated that global “video traffic will be 82 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2021, up from 73 percent in 2016.” So it’s no surprise that businesses have been jumping on board in an effort to keep their audiences’ attention and create content that has more share potential.

Incorporating videos onto your site might seem like something that doesn’t apply to a service-based business like yours. But visuals are a pretty powerful tool when it comes to getting (and keeping) the attention of your customers. Yes, images are crucial to a successful business website, but customized videos are a more engaging way to showcase your products or services. In fact, it’s something we use as a marketing tool for our customers.

At Locallogy, we use the program Wistiato create interactive videos for our clients. Wistia is a video hosting service that delivers fast and customizable videos. It provides a full library of tools including SEO, player customization and call-to-action (CTA) capabilities, which makes it great to get the most engagement out of your videos. There are other services out there that do the same thing, such as Vimeo, Dailymotion and YouTube, so you can easily find the one that works best for your business.

We’ve used Wistia’s video hosting service in many different facets of our business, including for our own marketing to display testimonial videos of how our clients feel about working with us. We’ve also used Wistia’s amazing video delivery to build some great video backgrounds for some of our clients that have highly visual products, such as Outdoor-FX, a company that creates high-end outdoor living spaces.

Along with having a more creative way to showcase your services, here are the benefits to using video hosting on your website.

Disclaimer: We are NOT promoting Wistia as a paid partner, but since this is the video hosting service we use with our clients, we are using it as an example of the all the benefits you see when using a service similar to this .

As Wistia explains on its website, interactive video programs “turn passive viewers into active audience members.” Instead of scrolling past images or browsing your gallery, videos get your audience engaged in your content. They’re choosing to watch and listen to the information you add to a page, making it more likely they’ll absorb what they’re learning about your business. And with video hosting services, you can track the analytics of your video to see specific engagement stats (more on this later).

One of the major benefits to video hosting services like Wistia is the customization capabilities. You have the ability to customize your video in a variety of ways such as:

• Editing color, controls and design on your video so it matches your business’s brand
  
• Prompting the user to enter an email address to view the video
  
• Inserting CTAs directly in the video to motivate the viewer to take action immediately
  
• Creating pop-up titles and descriptions at specific times
  
• Adding links to the video to direct users to pages with more information
  

Many of our clients use videos to showcase their products or talk about their business or services. It’s important for them to see how effective the videos are in terms of user engagement. Tracking your audience’s engagement is just another way you can use a video hosting service to see how many people your video is reaching and how they are interacting. With access to various data points, you can make adjustments based on total plays, action taken and drop-off rate. Using Wistia or other similar services to host your videos allows you to control and monitor video engagement for customers.

As we continue to use our mobile devices more and more for Internet searches, it’s crucial that your website is responsiveon all viewing methods. An easy way to drive people away from your site is having content that won’t load properly or play on your device. The same standard applies to videos on your website. But video hosting services eliminate that problem because they make videos responsive to all platforms. They also have fast streaming capabilities to deliver your content quickly and efficiently to your audience.

The videos created by Wistia and other similar hosting services are easily supported by website platforms, so you can place your video anywhere on your site and it will work without any issues. Even if you switch to a new website platform, you won’t have to deal with reformatting your video or seeing playback issues.

Video content is only going to increase in its popularity as an information medium, so you’d be smart to make the most of this trend and embrace video hosting within your own website. Although we use Wistia for our clients (and have had great success with it), there are a variety of other services out there you can experiment with. If you’re looking for a new way to get your audience engaged and take action, consider incorporating video hosting on your business’s website.