2015 Video Marketing Buyer’s Guide

Welcome to the 2015 Video Marketing Buyer’s Guide. The solutions included here on this list were hand picked to create a full suite of tools for your business. From content creation to video hosting, analytics, and YouTube tools, this guide has you covered.

Because businesses of different sizes have unique needs, we have broken each section of the guide to down to represent small business and the enterprise Click on the tabs to navigate between the two in each section.

Video players and hosting solutions are the simplest form of online video delivery. These solutions provide you with core video technology, which is the video player. Monthly packages are generally based on bandwidth and store and in being competitive with free solutions, these vendors offer own complimentary introductory plans.

SproutVideo and Wistia do a great job with providing a solid video player that is designed to be branded to your liking, and rich analytics, including identity tracking. We especially like Wistia because of the quick load video playback (when a Wistia video is embedded on a page, the video loads when the page loads, so when the viewer clicks play, the video starts right away and there is no buffer load time). Both small business solutions  also offer video marketing feature sets such as email gating.

On the Enterprise side, your standard mammoths, Ooyala and Brightcove who offer a very sturdy video player and infrastructure to build pretty much any video workflow and experience desired. These two solutions are perfect for large media companies, brands that work with agencies to roll out online video campaigns.

Video Marketing is the talk of the town and these solutions harness the power of online video. Advanced video engagement analytics, marketing automation connectors and CRM integrations — delivering sales teams and marketers valuable data about how prospects are engaging with content. That’s what video marketing is all about.

The good news for small businesses is that powerful tools are available at at a very low price point, solutions like Wistia and Vidyard take the lead. Vidyard having out of the box lead generation tools and connectors and apps with all the popular marketing automation providers, including an app for Salesforce.

Wistia’s revolutionary identity tracking led the market to a whole new set of video analytics. HubSpot together with Wistia offer the most “tight-knit” video MAP integration.

On the Enterprise side Vidcaster takes the lead with the most advanced analytics available. Vidcaster provides lead generation, contact management, in-video interactivity, and video sites.

LoopLogic has a ton of integrations with marketing automation and CRM providers, lead generation tools, and analytics. When compared to Vidcaster’s analytics, Vidcaster wins.

Video learning is becoming more popular for businesses of all sizes. In the early days of video learning, complex and expensive content creation processes accompanied by budget heavy software and hardware were the answer. Today, small businesses can launch video training courses that are effective and measurable.

uStudio is one of the companies leading that charge. uStudio provides and easy way to upload and present training content tied to specific training or certification objectives. If you are a Salesforce user, you will love how video analytics are reported and tracked within the application. Chatter users can easily share video content via their Chatter feed.

Medicore works with universities and education institutions to deploy video learning websites with organization and search making it easy to present video in courses and structured formats.

On the Enterprise side there is one of the largest and most respected online video provider, Kaltura which provides a flexible open source platform for creating video learning environments. Kaltura is great for teams and departments with dedicated resources assigned specific to deploying and managing video.

When it comes to employee learning and team training, a staple in the business for years has been Brainshark a tool that gives your the ability to create content, upload and share across field service teams using mobile devices anywhere in the world. Brainshark is great tool, specifically for large, remote sales teams.

When it comes to managing YouTube there are hundreds of different solutions, out of those solutions only a few stand tall. These tools included here are some of the best available and make it really easy to launch a channel and managing everything from branding to organizational layout.

YouTube analytics can sometimes be hard to understand and can better be presented, so premium solutions to help with this fill a great need for a brand looking to get a ahead on the platform.

TubeTrack is a great solution for managing all elements of a YouTube presence, we especially like the competitor tracker and keyword tracker. Since YouTube is the second largest search engine, it definitely makes sense to keep track of keywords.

Vidsy is an amazing tools for creating YouTube gallery widgets or a YouTube powered video website on your own domain and in your branding.

For agencies and brands, take a strong look at VidIQ a quickly emerging enterprise-grade YouTube management platform complete with analytics and advanced reporting and benchmarking.

To learn more about these recommended solutions click on their profile above or visit their websites. If you have suggestions or would like to add another video solution provider not listed here, please contact us or leave a note in the comments below.

Have a great 2015!