6 Amazing Benefits of Video Hosting for Business

6 Amazing Benefits of Video Hosting for Business

What is the reason to use a video hosting service if you can upload your videos to YouTube? This is a question that may have crossed many people’s minds.

Using a paid video hosting service offers many benefits that a free service does not, such as effective marketing tools and tech support. With more businesses using video marketing on a daily basis, video hosting services are becoming very popular.

What is video hosting?

All online videos have to be hosted somewhere. You can upload a video to YouTube and embed it on your website. When someone lands on your site and wants to watch a video, clicking on the ‘play button’ causes YouTube to transmit the file data, even though the person is watching on your site. You can also host your own videos without using a third-party site such as YouTube.

One benefit of hosting your videos on YouTube is because this frees up your own server’s bandwidth. You may also run into storage space issues when hosting videos on your own site without using a third party, like YouTube. However, there are also some downsides to hosting videos on YouTube – read on to find out more.

Many benefits come from using a video hosting platform including more security, options to customize and actionable analytics. If video is a key component of your marketing strategy, here are some of the benefits you will experience.

1. Improved SEO

As a marketer, you want your videos to reach as wide an audience as possible, and YouTube is great for this purpose. What you may forget, however, is the vast amount of content that appears on YouTube.

Features like ‘related videos’ are designed to keep viewers watching video after video and may drive people away from the content you’ve worked so hard to create. The worst-case scenario is if a video of one of your competitors appears in the list of suggestions!

Social media channels, such as YouTube, can help you to reach a wide audience but if you want to achieve other goals such as engagement and conversion, it’s advisable to use a video hosting solution.

Search engines battle to index video content as spiders do not know what videos contain without optimized titles, descriptions, and tags.

The embed codes used by reputable video hosting platforms automate video SEO by injecting JSON-LD metadata into your site’s page. This means the embedded videos can be indexed by search engines and return results for your website instead of for YouTube.

2. Customization options

If you post videos on YouTube, it’s impossible to remove YouTube branding from the players. The ability to add your own branding is possible when using a video hosting solution. You can make the player feel as though it belongs to your website pages. Use customizable fonts, colors, play buttons, and controls to suit your brand image.

3. Responsive and fast-loading videos

Video hosting services automatically adapt the format and quality of videos to suit the mobile device the viewer is using, whether this is a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop.

You want your viewers to experience crystal clear video anytime and anywhere. Hosting your videos on your web hosting service instead means probably having to spend time adapting videos for different devices and browsers.

Nobody wants to watch videos that buffer all the time or take a long time to load. Of course, this depends on the internet connection of the users. However, video hosting platforms usually have a network of servers all over the world which measure connections and deliver quality video with the least amount of buffering possible.

4. Better Security

Video security is vital for businesses today as business training is often heavily reliant on videos. A video hosting solution offers more rigorous security, using features such as watermarks, encryption and backend authentication. If you want to share confidential information and control who watches it, professional video hosting is a must.

5. Clickable CTAs for lead generation

Guide engaged viewers to where you want them to be with a clickable call-to-action. Video hosting platforms, like Cincopa, allow you to place them at the front, inside or at the end of your video.

With this functionality, you may be talking about an eBook, and you may say “If you’re interested in receiving the eBook right now, just fill out the form you’re about to see. If you don’t want it just hit the skip button.” You can also add an email gate to a video, with viewers having to fill in a form before they can watch content.

You can integrate your hosting account with your email marketing service and CRM platforms. This means you can send the email addresses you collect right to a list set up in an autoresponder and trigger a drip campaign.

6. Actionable analytics

Video analytics are becoming more important than ever, and the best video hosting platforms offer you more detailed analytics than you get from free platforms. Every view generates a video heatmap, showing viewer behavior.

You are able not only to see who watched a video but how long they watched and which parts engaged them more than others. This helps you to understand more about your audience and improve your videos. Without the analytics, you have no way of knowing how your audience is responding to your videos.

You can even see engagement graphs and trends to see how your entire video library is performing over time. Tracking an individual’s viewing history allows you to see how each viewer interacted with your videos from the time they watched the first one.

Concluding thoughts

Some of the questions you face when you use videos extensively for marketing campaigns are where to host them, why you need to host them there, what you need from a hosting platform and which one is the best. The bottom line is to find a solution that best suits your business needs. Make sure it helps you to create a better viewing experience and achieve your business goals.

AUTHOR PROFILE:

Author Name: SMRIDHI MALHOTRA

Having more than 8 years of writing experience, Smridhi Malhotra is a professional tech, health and travel blogger. She loves to gather and share her profound knowledge about latest developments in technology. Smridhi is a management graduate and visual graphics artist and is currently pursuing master’s in behavioral psychology. Her hobbies are practicing mindfulness, counseling children and traveling (a special love for Africa). You can reach me here.