Often people assume that the terms video marketing and video hosting are metonyms. Are you one of them? Then go ahead, continue reading, and get to know how video marketing and hosting platforms are two different services.

These are the best webinar hosting platforms recommended by Shane Barker, which are helpful to educate existing customers

Video Hosting Platform

A video hosting platform is otherwise called a video-sharing platform. It offers businesses and individuals the platform to share videos. A video hosting platform takes care of video streaming, playback, and ensure its users with a smooth running video experience. Also, it helps in bringing a huge amount of traffic to the websites.

Apart from these benefits, a good hosting platform also offers:

Content security
Set thumbnail
Add subtitles
Basic analytics

Everything till here seems great – A video hosting platform helps you get your videos online, drives more engagement, and provides excellent exposure to your content. But, is it possible (with a hosting platform) to customize your video player, personalize videos, and understand your viewers? We see some engagement happening except without knowing where it is coming from.

This is where a video marketing platform comes into the picture.

Video Marketing Platform

A video marketing platform is a hub for all of your video creation, publishing, and monitoring efforts. A video marketing platform enables you to track and collect data on every step your viewer’s take while watching your videos, in real-time. This data helps you understand your audiences and video performance better.

So, why should I understand my audience?

The answer is simple, to meet their needs and keep them coming back, you must first get to know them better.

Developing a strategy to generate leads, get them to understand your business, gain their trust, and convert them effortlessly has been a chimera for any business. Until the arrival of video marketing platforms.

So unless you use a video marketing platform, you can’t achieve the goals that you want, using a video hosting platform. Even though a video hosting platform provides insights on the number of views and other basic reports, like watch rate, you can’t depend on it alone to glean more in-depth knowledge about the overall and individual viewer’s behavior.

Moreover, it’s not entirely about the number of views, the engagement you draw on a video. It’s about how your videos convert into quality leads and then to your loyal customers. This is the reason you can’t craft a marketing or sales strategy with a just a video hosting platform. As you’ll not find the features to generate leads and convert them.

Whereas, when it comes to a video marketing platform, you can create email campaigns, personalize mass emails, and add timeline actions (CTA, annotations, lead generation forms, custom polls, etc.)

These features enable you to generate leads with your videos itself. Also, a video marketing platform provides features that help you improve your brand awareness by customizing your video and player to coordinate it with your brand.

With a video marketing platform in hand, you’ll be able to identify every movement your viewers take. In short, it provides detailed insights into who is watching your video, the type of device, and from which location they’re watching. You can even check when the viewers watch your videos on other platforms (like social media, websites) and which portions of the video they liked most.

(sneak peek of the analytics offered by Hippo Video)

Also, video marketing platforms enable you to embed videos anywhere and offers seamless integrations with sales, support, and marketing solutions. This adds the benefit of doing everything that it takes to convert your viewers into customers, all under one platform.

In a nutshell

A video hosting platform is something as simple as YouTube, where you can host your videos, reach audiences, and get basic tracking reports. On the other hand, a video marketing platform provides everything that a hosting platform can offer and much more. In addition, it offers unique actionable features that help convert your viewers into customers and empowers you to measure your video performance in detail.

List of Video Hosting and Video Marketing Platforms you must try:

Video Marketing Platforms:

Hippo Video

You’d be hard-pressed to find a video marketing platform for your business as good as Hippo Video. Because Hippo Video can handle multiple stages of your sales or marketing funnel with ease. From video creation, brand recognition, lead generation, closing deals to measuring success and satisfying your customers. And there’s much more you can do within this single platform. So, if you’re ready to step up your business goals, Hippo Video can help you get there.

You can create a free account to try out what Hippo Video offers before committing to a plan. Hippo video offers a free trial for 14 days where you’ll have access to all the features based on the plan you choose.

Price: Choose a plan according to your requirements. Check out our pricing.

Wistia

Wistia offers marketers to track and analyze video viewers including the ability to measure each individual’s viewing session, their location, organization and IP address.

Price: Wistia starts at $99 per month.

Vidyard

Vidyard helps you host your videos, analyzes their effectiveness, and transforms them into marketing tools. They provide you features to manage your video collection and the optimal viewing experience for your visitors. And their approach to video hosting eliminates the barriers to using online video, by integrating visibility, control, and optimization.

Price: The average price per customer is $1,500/month. In some cases, there may be a setup fee. There’s a $2,000 fee to activate the marketing automation integrations.

Video Hosting Platforms:

SproutVideo

SproutVideo is an easy to use video hosting platform for small to medium-sized businesses. The platform makes it easy to upload video content and add security features. If you must protect any information or limit who can watch your videos, this platform might be a good choice for you.

Price: Basic plans start at $59.99 per month, and prices for large teams go up to $499.99 per month.

Vzaar

Vzaar makes uploading and managing your videos a snap. The drag-and-drop feature can transfer numerous video files at the same time, even if the file formats are different. It automatically moves your video library so you don’t have to do it manually. The platform is integrated with Google Analytics, which helps you generate custom reports on how your videos are performing.

Price: Vzaar starts at $209 per month for 1000 GB of monthly bandwidth and 1000 GB of storage.

Now that you know the difference between a video marketing and video hosting platform, it’s your turn to pick a platform.

If you feel I missed to mention a platform that you use or if you’re using one listed in this article, let us know in the comments and share us your wisdom. Follow us on Twitter for more updates!

Saketa Chilukuri

Saketa is a Product Marketer at Hippo Video. She is an aficionado of video selling and an avid listener of true crime podcasts. On the flip side, she enjoys leisurely mornings and adventures.