The Ideal Video Creation Platform
Wish #4: Push-Button Video Publishing and Distribution

OK, you’ve completed your video. Now what?

The ideal video creation tool would incorporate features that exist now in Online Video Platforms (OVPs) that allow you to package, publish, and distribute your video online. Adding OVP capabilities would provide the following features:

>> Bandwidth Management for Your Video

An OVP allows you to host your videos “in the cloud,” so the processing power required to run them for multiple viewers does not bog down your web server.

>> Control the Viewing Experience of Your Video

The OVP automatically transcodes the videos into up to 9 different formats to ensure the optimal format is served to each viewer based on device, browser, and connection speed.

You can also define the look and functionality of the video player, including:

• Autoplay: Determine whether your video should play automatically as soon as the page loads, or if the viewer must click the “play” button to start the video.
• Branding: Upload your company logo so it is visible as a watermark in the corner of the video player during playback. The logo can be click-able and can direct the viewer to a specified page.
• Sharing controls: The user can click the sharing control to automatically post the video to social media, email, or embed in their own blog post.
• Playlist: At the conclusion of your video, thumbnails of other related videos can be presented to the viewer, to prolong the viewer engagement and lead the viewer through a more complete story.

Click this video to see many of these features in action:

>> Embedding, Publishing and Distribution of Your Video

Embed videos to your website, your blog, and your Facebook page. Link them to email marketing campaigns, and publish them to YouTube and other popular video sharing websites.

>> Search Engine Optimization of Your Video

Your video is practically invisible to search engines until you use text to define and describe it. Enter a description and optimized meta tags to make sure you show up for the appropriate search keywords. By incorporating these features in the video authoring platform you ensure consistency among all the places your video is distributed, for maximum SEO impact.  And if you want to leave this task to the marketing professionals or clients, no problem, because remember the video creation platform is a cloud-based multi-user tool.

>> Variable CTAs for Your Video

Marketing professionals have found that video is the ultimate content for marketing engagement. Video drives higher audience attention than information presented in any other format. When used properly, video can improve the results of virtually any marketing campaign:

• 53X more likely to get a page-one search result (Forrester Research)
• 96% higher click-through rate for email campaigns (Implix)
• 64% higher likelihood of website visitor purchase (Comscore)
• 2X more likely to generate a social media like, share, or comment (Facebook)

The key to using video effectively for measurable marketing advantage is to get the audience members to watch the video and then to do something: call, click, download, buy, register, donate, etc. You need to have a strong Call-To-Action (CTA).

The tricky part is that video production can be a costly and time-consuming endeavor and marketing CTAs can be plentiful. If you need to make a unique video for each different CTA it can represent a major impact to your budget and schedule.

So here’s the idea: de-couple the CTA from the video production process. Treat the CTA as an overlay that exists separately from the video itself. The CTA could take the form of a pre-roll, post-roll, or ticker overlay. It could be accessed, created, and modified by non-video marketing professionals (again, this is where the cloud-based multi-user platform provides a huge advantage). The CTA could be changed easily and different versions could be tested. This would enable you to optimize the CTA, employ multiple different CTAs for the same video, and squeeze maximum value out of your video marketing content.

YouTube does a nice job of this with their annotation functionality, but unfortunately YouTube annotations can only link to items within your YouTube channel (another video, playlist, subscription tool, etc.) and you cannot link to, for example, a landing page on your website.

These OVP features for publishing and distributing your finished video are real game-changing features that should be added to the video authoring tool.  You could create the world’s most incredible video, but all is lost if you don’t optimally publish it and if the viewer experience is not managed properly.