I’ve been a big fan of Vimeo as a hosting platform for business video communication for a long time. Vimeo provides a very clean, efficient player for embedded videos on websites. And the Vimeo video player can be easily aligned with your corporate branding, including logo, corporate colours, etc.
In the past, however, Vimeo has lacked serious features for business-video power users. That has changed with these recent additions:
Video Chapters to improve usability of longer videos
Most business videos today are short and to the point. At On Point, Corporate videos are generally 3 minutes in length, or shorter. Videos for Social Media sharing are most often 30 seconds or less. But, especially in B2B, there is still a need for longer run-time business videos – such as training videos, case study videos, or manufacturing tour videos. And chapters are a perfect way to break up these longer run-time videos, allowing viewers to easily navigate to segments of the video that they are most interested in. And chapters means videos are no longer “linear”, allowing viewers to scan a video as they would a written page. Bottom line: chapters make longer videos easier to consume.
Try out the chapter feature on this 10 minute Manufacturing Tour video. Note the chapters identified on the video timeline, and the chapter menu available on the RHS of the playbar.
Vimeo also provides enhanced video analytics for users of chapters, providing deeper insight into viewer interests and preferences.
Video Email Capture for Sales Lead Generation
Marketing Automation is a powerful tool for B2B online marketers, allowing marketing to capture sales leads, automatically grade and score these sales leads, and automatically nurture these sales leads until they are “sales ready” and passed to the company’s sales team via their CRM software. In the past, Marketing Automation limited email capture to online written content like whitepapers, case studies, and articles.
Vimeo now offers the ability to capture emails at any time during the playback of the embedded video content — before, during, or after. Email capture information can be automatically synced with your Email Marketing Automation provider, or manually downloaded as a CSV spreadsheet.
Video Collaboration Tools to speed Video Production
On Point is constantly looking for ways to decrease the time and reduce the cost of video production. Vimeo’s collaboration tools have saved us and our clients oodles of time and money. Vimeo’s collaboration tools allow us to work with all members of the video production team, including the client, to annotate required changes, and efficiently brainstorm improvements.
Add time-coded notes throughout your video, and collaborate with the entire team.Other key Vimeo features for Business users
There are a number of other powerful features that Vimeo delivers for Business users.
- Cards that can display messages and links at any time during playback. This is a great opportunity to hyperlink to other web assets during playback. I know what you’re thinking: this is a terrible feature that will distract viewers, allowing them to break-off and abandon the video. Yes, but strategically placed, these cards will increase the viewer’s options, and better align the video medium with the hypertext “jump off” option that users are so accustomed to online. And, from my perspective, anything we can do to reduce the inherent linear nature of video will increase the overall user experience.
- Improved SEO by allowing you to add important structured data about your videos hosted on Vimeo. This will make it easier for your target audience to find your videos on Google.
- Replace Videos. Unlike YouTube, Vimeo makes it easy — with one click — to replace a video with an updated, newer version. That way you keep all your metadata, analytics, video settings, embed code, etc.. A huge timesaver!
- End Screens provide another opportunity to guide the viewer journey, this time at the end of the video. With Vimeo, you have complete control over “Next Up”, and a clean interface free of disruptive content.
Vimeo’s “End Screen” featureThe Bottom Line
Video Production — shoot and edit — is only a small part of a successful business video project. To fully realize Return-on-Investment for your business video communications, many B2B & B2C companies are looking for end-to-end support from their video partner. Contact us at On Point Video, and allow us to show you our full end-to-end capability in video production, marketing, distribution, and management.