Why Should You Use Wistia Instead of YouTube?
Wistia and YouTube are two extremely different platforms that serve very different purposes. Wistia is exclusively intended to meet the needs of B2B companies using video for support, marketing, and sales. YouTube is intended to assist content creators wishing to monetize their videos, as well as organizations investing in large advertising campaigns.
In essence, Wistia gives you complete control over the experience, and YouTube requires a unique strategy as a social video platform.
What Are Some of the Benefits of Using Wistia?
Why use Wistia to host your marketing videos? When choosing YouTube vs Wistia, Wistia is better if you want to bring traffic to your website, increase conversions, or boost engagement across the websites you control.
Below are some of the key benefits that Wistia can bring to your business and to your overall marketing strategy:
Video Player Experience
You can customize the branded video player, player controls, and utilize custom video thumbnails with Wistia. Custom video or static thumbnails tend to receive more clicks than the typical video embedded on a website.
Not to mention, videos embedded with Wistia are fully ad-free. And using Wistia Channels, you have control over what your audiences see next. Moreover, you can replace your videos with ease while keeping the same embed code (you don’t need to change where it is embedded).
Lead Generation
Email collectors and calls to action help you generate leads that you can send to the CRM/MAP integration of your choice. Getting someone’s email opens up a direct line of communication for you to engage them in other channels and campaigns.
Video SEO
The automated video SEO on Wistia video embed codes assists you in driving more traffic to your website, not to YouTube – where your audience will get lost or see a competitor’s video. Wistia’s robust player uses the text data automatically from your transcripts and captions, as well as adding a custom schema to every one of your videos to make sure that they are ranked in all the right places – and drive that traffic to your website.
Where Is YouTube Better?
First of all, YouTube is great and free! When choosing Wistia vs YouTube, if you are more concerned with reaching an audience than driving traffic, YouTube is better. YouTube videos usually drive traffic to YouTube.com through search and social, meaning you cannot track interactions with your content as efficiently and drive as many profitable actions from your content directly.
If you work for a consumer product brand or your clients mostly interact with your brand offline, focusing on reach over tracking and on-site interactions may be a good decision. Likewise, if you’re embarking on a major branding campaign to increase word-of-mouth and don’t mind giving up control over how people watch your video, YouTube is a better option.
In addition, people who subscribe to your YouTube channel can receive notifications in the YouTube app. Your video content will also be highly visible to them across the platform every time they use it.
When it comes to analytics, you can use YouTube to obtain more specific information regarding subscriber behavior, break down view counts and retention by subscribers vs non-subscribers, and so on. Subscribers, however, do not receive any emails.
Also read: What Does It Mean to Subscribe to a YouTube Channel?
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When Should You Use Both Platforms?
Understanding the strengths of YouTube vs. Wistia, the question you’re probably asking yourself is, “Can I just use both of these video platforms?” Yes, here are some of the best practices and things to think about for your video marketing strategy.
Lots of companies select to use Wistia for videos embedded on their sites to take advantage of the advanced tools and analytics, yet they also upload videos to YouTube to take advantage of the social reach that a presence on YouTube offers.
Keep in mind that having the videos in two places can sometimes lead to cannibalization in social and search. For competitive keywords, YouTube can sometimes rank higher than your domain. And if users select to share a YouTube version of a video instead of the version of the video on your website, you will miss out on Wistia’s user-based tracking. This may be a reasonable price to pay for the extra reach; however, every business needs to evaluate this risk and opportunity in light of their own marketing priorities.
It is critical to remember that YouTube serves as both a social media platform and a video hosting platform, and that they usually do so without any additional context regarding your brand or the video in question. As a result, not all your videos will necessarily make sense to a wider audience browsing on YouTube.com. YouTube should be used in a strategic way, as part of a broader video marketing strategy, rather than simply as a repository where all videos are hosted and held.
Conclusion
Which one is better, Wistia vs YouTube? Hopefully, by now you’ve realized that both video platforms have their strengths, and which one is better will ultimately depend on your goals for the video.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Jocelin is keeping a strong passion for the multimedia industry with her first thoughts and visions. While continuously absorbing relevant knowledge, she believes that pictures, videos, and music can bring so much pleasure to life. To go deeper into the industry, she has acquired many skills in video editing. Also, she can provide readers with ways to solve problems on image, video, and auido topics.