The relaunch of Wistia Channels comes as small businesses are focusing more on creating their own content.
The ability to create video is made possible with affordable tools such as smartphones, digital cameras and editing software. With these tools, owners can create more content and engage with their customers on a personal level.
Wistia Channels Relaunched
According to Wistia, it is opening its platform so small businesses can take back control of their content from Google and Facebook. In order to find out more about the new features, Small Business Trends carried out an email interview wit the CEO of Wistia, Chris Savage.
One of the challenges small businesses have when it comes to video content is deploying it.
Small Business Trends: How easy is it for small business owners to deploy their content with Wistia?
Savage: It’s super simple to add videos or create a Channel for your site, all you need to do is copy and paste the embed code to display it as a popover or an inline embed. Any changes you make to your Channel will automatically be reflected, without replacing the embed code. Our software is created to be as intuitive and efficient as possible for any user, regardless of experience with video creation.
The Relaunch
With the relaunch, Wistia is making Channels available to non-premium customers as a competitor to YouTube. This is going to let you build an audience on your website, instead of on social media. This means more control of your content.
Small Business Trends: How much control do small businesses have?
Chris Savage: Channels allow small businesses to take back control of their content and customer data from social media platforms. This is going to enable direct connections with subscribers, viewers, and fans while providing a distraction-free viewing experience. Gaining control is ingrained into the product’s objective.
New features like custom audiences will enable businesses to integrate Wistia data with your Ads Manager. This will let you hyper-focus with your social ad targeting and messaging. Additionally, you can collect email addresses right from your Channel using the Channel subscribers feature.
Having more control is fine and well, but how easy is it to use. Afterall, most small businesses have limited staff, without the budget to hire someone to manage their content.
Ease of Use
Small Business Trends: Is it as easy as YouTube and Facebook?
Chris Savage: Yes! The format is as easy to use, with more to offer than YouTube and Facebook.
With Channels you have full control over your visuals; add your own logo, choose an alignment, pick a font, and customize the player colors to match your brand. You can also upload your own banner that will display on the top of the page with a static image or looping video.
Once you create your video you can organize it with customizable sections and you can display your Channel in a carousel or grid layout. More importantly, Savage adds “All of the content you create on the Wistia Channel is your own. There are no ads, or distractions from your competitors or unrelated content.”
You can embed the videos in a binge-watchable format to encourage viewers to spend more time with your brand.
Small Business Trends: Will it deliver the same or similar results as YouTube and Facebook with this marketing model?
Chris Savage: Channels is designed to surpass the results available from social platform’s metrics.
With Wistia Channels your business will see better engagement with your content while driving quality traffic from search and social media. You also own the data of your subscribers and you can sync this information to your CRM system to optimize the data.
Content Marketing
In closing, SBT asked Savage how important is content marketing in today’s digital ecosystem?
He explains brands such as MailChimp, RedBull, Peloton and Patagonia are moving budget away from advertising and towards creating their own original content.
This is allowing them to nurture and engage their fanbase who become advocates. And it is all happening without having to pay for every impression or other metrics social media channels use.
The new Wistia Channels is available online now at wistia.com. There is a free version with limited features and the full suite starts at $399 per month.
Image: Depositphotos.com