When it comes to conducting business, there are many ways to entertain your customers. For some, the word entertain may sting a bit and may prove to be an eye sore, but – entertainment is an indubitable part of every business. Of course, the primary goal is to make sure that the content you’re trying to promote or the product that you’re trying to sell is enticing to people. Substance reigns supreme, but the outer layer, the appearance, is what makes something worth a customer’s minute.
Therefore, many companies have opted for an interactive approach to business. This includes more than just textual content and ads, but also images, podcasts, animations and most importantly – videos. In this group mentioned above, videos are the odd man out. This is due to the unique approach videos allow you to have towards the visitors of your site. In their way, they shorten the time it takes to elaborate on a particular subject. Because of this ease of approach and uniqueness, more and more websites are integrating videos into their marketing and business strategy. However, a problem appears after the decision to implement videos – which video hosting service to use? There is a substantial amount of video CDNs to choose from, but how to make the right decision? It takes a little bit of diving under the surface, and we’ll show you how to accomplish this.
The basic factors
In the midst of looking for a suitable video service, you have to pay attention to a certain number of factors. Look at it like a to-do list, the necessary list of test your chosen video hosting service has to pass for you to use it. Of course, there are some basic ones that you have to use as a starting point. Let’s take a look at them and their significance.
• Responsive design. When it comes to adding videos to your site, the first thing that catches you and your customers’ eye is the design of the video player. Will your customers have a hard time finding their way on the website? Is the design dull? Is it easy to understand all the necessary commands and be an independent user?
• Customization options. Every company has a different goal and idea in mind when they’re looking to complete a video integration process. Does the video hosting service allow for different formats? How about on-site editing? Is it possible to get a chance to calibrate some details of the video once it’s uploaded? These are all significant questions to consider when observing the video customization options of a video hosting service.
• Video SEO. If you’re looking to expand your reach, you would want to look for a certain hosting service that is both stable and popular. Search engines will crawl such sites first.
• Marketing tools. Many marketers are interested in a video hosting service that results in their video embed can withstand additional promotion. Much of these services have the option of having your video boosted by regular payments, just so that people browsing the site get to see it more often.
As important as these factors are, video asset management is a tricky area of business, and there are a few factors that often get overlooked. Because people often shun them to the site, it’s not a rarity that the use of a video service ends up backfiring. To prevent this from happening, you should expand your horizons and take a look at the bigger picture.
The underrated factors that determine your choice of a video hosting service
If you want your campaigns to be impenetrably efficient, then it’s high time that you started looking at all the details out there. It all has to begin with observing the important factors while choosing a video hosting service. These details are the real heart of the action and the pragmatic determiners of your overall video performance. Some of them are obvious, and some of them are unknown to the general public. Let’s take a look at them.
Advertising
While most people opt to emphasize customization options and the overall design of the video-hosting site, advertising is still a big deal in providing video refuge for your company. Does the service implement ads anywhere on the site? If so, are the in video form or simply banners? Where are those banners when the video plays?
These questions are all to be taken into consideration when making the pick. Sites like YouTube are out of the question if you choose to have shorter videos. Nobody is going to bother watching a 30-second ad for a 30-second video.
Security
Account security is always an important aspect of every choice you make online, so we’re not going to mention the obvious. The aspect of security we wanted to center around is the privacy of your videos. It’s important not to allow everyone to download your videos because that would be a disaster in so many ways.
Your content is supposed to be free to be SEEN by everyone, not USED by everyone. Therefore, you can say that the hosting service should have strict rules on downloading things and an efficient way of enforcing those rules – making it a true private video hosting.
In-depth video analytics
Because your videos are designed to please the customer, you would want to know how pleased the customers are. Therefore, you would want to post your videos on a service that gives you a plethora of analytics to look at. We’re not talking about simple things like views, comments, but a whole different kind of complex data.
What is the average watching time of every clip? At what moment do people generally stop watching? How did each visitor arrive at the page where the video is at? All these questions will help you determine the best video hosting service for you. If you have active content, you need to know how and why is it so successful.
Ease of use in managing the content
If you’re willing to post your videos to a video hosting service, you would want to have complete control over your content. This means no waiting times, no pending requests and no third-party control over your account, videos, and information.
This set of features also tells you a lot about the video platform itself. Because they’re willing to have an easy interface, it directly implies that they respect both pros and amateurs equally. You want to aim for a service with such a policy.
Good video streaming and quality
Everything boils down to this factor. How good of a video will the service be able to support? It’s 2018, and nobody is going to watch the grainy footage and animations in 360p or 480p. If you’re on a low budget, 1080p is okay, but you wouldn’t want to mess with a service that can’t support anything Ultra HD or more.
This all depends on the quality of the serves that the service uses. Does the website crash anytime? Is it prone to DDoS attacks? These are all important questions you have to ask yourself.
