Video is becoming an increasingly important part of modern business - it can play a part in your marketing strategy, sales strategy and customer service strategy. At JDR, our video platform of choice is Vidyard which allows us to host videos on our website, blog and landing pages - but it also allows our team to send personalised, one-to-one videos.
Vidyard allows us to quickly record our screen or a video via our webcam (or a combination of both) and easily embed that video in an email or on a web page. We have been finding more and more uses for this technology and are constantly sent messages from prospects and customers who are impressed and surprised at receiving video emails.
As a result, at JDR we use Vidyard for:
Vidyard has a free Google Chrome extension which you can install and start recording videos with straight away. You'll get the following features at no cost:
With the Vidyard 'Teams' package, however, you can get a lot more from the platform.
The Vidyard Teams package is, at the time of writing, $300 per month - check this live here.
Here's the difference between a paid and a free account:
The video 'sharing page' is the page your customers and prospects will go to in order to actually watch the videos (unless they are embedded within one of your website pages). With a free account, people will watch your videos on a Vidyard branded page with Vidyard calls to action. With the paid plan, you can not only brand the video sharing page to match your own branding, this page can be custom designed - it can match your website (and appear as part of your website) and can have specific messages, content and calls to action on it.
You want prospects to take action as a result of watching your videos - with the paid Vidyard subscription you can create calls to action at the start, end or during your videos. The calls to action can include links, forms, calendar/meeting booking forms and links to more videos to keep your clients/prospects watching.
This feature isn't available on the free version.
With the paid Vidyard plan you can create playlists - sequences/collections of videos which you can send to people on just one link. The image above shows how easy it is to select a number of emails and put them together - see an example of a video playlist here.
With the paid Vidyard plan you'll be able to understand how your videos are working, and use this information to improve your performance.
With a free Vidyard account, each of your team members will have their own set of logins - but as the business owner, you have no visibility on the videos they are sending, and no way of managing the calls to action or appearance of the videos.
With the paid plan, you manage your team from one portal/platform - and can view and edit the videos for each member of your team as well as getting analytics on how they are performing.
With a free account you'll get notifications that people have watched your videos - but you won't know WHO has watched the videos. The 'Teams' plan has this extra information.
With the free account your videos are hosted in the Vidyard account and they stay there - but with the paid plan you can download the videos and use them in other ways, including a quick 'share to YouTube' feature.
You can embed videos you create on your website pages and landing pages with Vidyard - with the free version this is limited to 5, compared with 50 on the 'Teams' package.
Adding videos onto your website and blog posts can improve SEO. Vidyard has a number of SEO features including the ability to optimise tags and add keywords for each video. However the key SEO feature, only available on the paid plan is 'captions.'
Captions automatically transcribe your videos into text, adding both subtitles for the video and also providing text which Google can actually read, meaning Google can pick up on the keywords and content of your video.
In addition, with a paid plan there are further benefits including:
JDR group are a certified Vidyard partner, and can help make video a key part of your business. We can help you:
To learn more and see Vidyard in action, you can watch our 60-minute, on-demand webinar 'Using Video In A Contactless World.'
The best place to start is by talking to us - we can show you live how Vidyard works and how you can make video work for your business. Use the link below to book a call with one of our experts, and get the answers to your questions: Book a call with us here.