2017 Video Marketing Buyer’s Guide

Welcome to the 2017 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, interactive video, video for sales email platforms, 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, the video player. Monthly packages are generally based on bandwidth and storage and in being competitive with free solutions, these vendors offer complimentary introductory plans. Complementary plans are packed with features such as video player styling, video gating (in-video email collection), viewer identity tracking (ability to track individuals watching videos).

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 and seamless 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. Wistia offers interactivity such as in-video links, chapters, and hotspots.

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. Although in 2016 we saw Ooyala go through corporate changes and try desperately to come up to speed with the innovation at Brightcove, Ooyala is still a player in the online video space powering some of the largest and most high volume video experiences on the web. These two solutions are perfect for large media companies, brands that work with agencies to roll out online video campaigns. Brightcove’s Video Marketing Suite product set is the leading set of video tools for marketers, while Ooyala has features that cater directly to media companies.

Video Marketing is the fastest emerging categories in online video. Video marketing platforms not only include a solid video player and hosting but also advanced video engagement analytics, marketing automation connectors and CRM integrations, interactivity, and video email functionality. — delivering sales teams and marketers valuable data about how prospects are engaging with content.

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. Both Wistia and Vidyard offer 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 Brightcove takes the lead with the most powerful feature sets for marketers. Brightcove provides lead generation, contact management, in-video interactivity, and video sites, social distribution, and a variety of content marketing system (CMS) integrations.

Vidyard has grown a lot in 2016 and can now be considered an enterprise-worthy video marketing platform with some of the same features offered by Brightcove. All-in-all, the Brightcove offering seams to scale better but has historically cost more than Vidyard’s offerings.

Video learning has gone through quite a transition in the last year with new offerings at various price points for businesses of all sizes. Gone are the complex and expensive content creation processes accompanied by budget heavy software and hardware. Today, small businesses can launch video training courses that are effective and measurable. Some of the solutions offered are completely free and can range from a simple tool to take a YouTube video and apply an interactive lesson to it, or more advanced such as developing and distributing courses containing multiple different content types.

When it comes to video learning, uStudio is a company that is leading in this category. uStudio provides and easy way to upload and present training content tied to specific employee training initiatives or certification objectives. For Salesforce customers, uStudio offers a complete integration that incorporates video analytics and library management with robust native reporting. Chatter users can easily share video content via their Chatter feed.

There are a few other solutions to mention in this category, one which should take the spotlight, specifically for the enterprise side, one of the largest and most respected online video providers, Kaltura. Kaltura provides a flexible open source platform for creating video learning environments that are internal and external. Kaltura is great for teams and departments with dedicated resources assigned specific to deploying and managing video. The platform is open source and can be configured to meet almost any requirement, but the downsides come in hidden costs tied to managing the platform across the deployment lifecycle.

Another notable vendor and provider of video learning and sales enablement software is Brainshark, a tool that gives users to create and upload video content, organize it, and share the videos across field service teams using mobile devices. Brainshark is great tool, specifically for large, remote sales teams that need to stay up to date on company compliance.

Interactive video came into its own this year. Made famous by YouTube via their interactive annotation toolset, interactive video software is now available to businesses big and small. Three main interactive video subcategories exist: 1) Basic Enrichment, which includes functionality such as in-video links, images, chaptering. 2) Ecommerce and Advanced, includes shoppable video and in-video conversion tools, custom branded annotations, and tagging and object tracking. 3) Learning and Education, includes quizzes, surveys, gradebooks, and learning management feature sets.

It has been a breakout year for HapYak a company that provides interactive video tools to businesses and organizations that have invested in an interactive video strategy. Offerings include a web-based studio to easily apply interactive elements of all types, stylize elements, and report on viewer interaction and behavior. HapYak is perfect enterprises and users that don’t want to rely on agencies to create interactive video experiences.

WireWax is another powerful solution aimed more towards brands that want to create interactive shopping experiences using video that simply enriching existing content. Brands that engage with WireWax are typically creating content around the interactivity, therefore the solution requires a more “hands on” approach.

Adways provides interactivity similar to both HapYak and WireWax with solutions for basic interactivity and more advanced feature sets for shoppable video scenarios.

This year we saw the emergence of a new category of online video, “video for sales.” Further defined, these solutions provide sales and service professionals tools for recording, packaging, and sending videos through email. Videos can be recorded via desktop or mobile devices and easily sent with popular email platforms like Outlook and Google Mail. The added benefit for sales professionals is the engagement analytics these solutions provide, which can notify when a contact has opened a video email, watched the video, specifically how much of the video was watched.

A leading solution in this category is BombBomb, a simple yet powerful tool that makes it easy to record and send video emails. Whether a single sales person or a team of hundreds of processionals, BombBomb scales across multiple scenarios and can be considered enterprise-grade.

Another solution is OneMob, very similar to BombBomb in functionality but designed specifically for sales teams that work within Salesforce CRM. Video recording, sending, and reporting is accessible from within the Salesforce interface making OneMob the perfect solution to inject into existing sales processes and procedures.

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 2017!