In this recap from a Dubb Support video, we are going to take a deep dive into the idea of a video platform for business. Whether you are thinking about using video for the first time or are looking for a better way to use video to engage with your prospects, you are in the right place. If you would like to view the video in its entirety, go ahead and click on the play button above. Enjoy the conversation!
Have you been searching for a video platform for business? Alternatively, have you been thinking about ways that you can use video to better interact with your prospects and close more sales?
A video platform is a fantastic tool for organizations of all shapes and sizes. This is true whether you are using video for the first time or have been creating sales and marketing videos for years. Through the power of video platforms, you can more efficiently build strong relationships with prospects and convert more of those prospects into paying customers.
In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into video platforms. Specifically, we are going to talk about what video platforms are, the characteristics of great video platforms, and several video platforms that can help you grow and scale your business. At the end of this post, you’ll be in a fantastic position to get the most out of video platforms like Dubb.
Let’s jump into it.
Video Platforms Explained
To get started, let’s talk about what a video platform is. After all, if we don’t settle on a basic definition, it is difficult to explore how we can use video platforms to reach our sales and marketing goals.
The formal definition of a platform is a structure that allows multiple products to be built within the same technical framework. While this definition (which was coined by tech blogger Jonathan Clarks) may be somewhat technical, a good way to think about a platform is by looking at Facebook. Facebook is one of the most dominant video platforms on the Internet today. On Facebook, users can spend their time on Messenger, their News Feed, and more. These are the components of the overall platform and Facebook is constantly adding new components to make the experience more engaging.
A video platform, therefore, is a central hub that provides you with a wide array of tools to help you get the most out of video. In a moment, we are going to discuss some of those key characteristics of a great video platform. This is crucial to understand, as you are going to want these specific features when you are choosing among video platforms for your organization.
That being said, just keep in mind that a video platform should make it extremely easy for you to create videos that get you sales. After all, as sales professionals and marketers, we aren’t creating videos simply for the sake of creating videos. We want to see a return on our investment. Your video platform should both help you develop strong relationships with your viewers and give you the best chance of converting that viewer into a paying customer. By finding sales-focused video platforms, you are putting yourself in the best position to succeed with your sales and marketing goals.
Characteristics of a Great Video Platform
With that in mind, let’s analyze several video platforms that exist on the Internet today. While we have plenty of video platforms to choose from, I specifically chose these video platforms because they fulfill several of the key components that sales professionals and marketers tend to look for.
For starters, that video platform must include tracking and analytics. When we are using video for sales and marketing purposes, we need the ability to see who is watching a specific video and how much of the video they have watched. It makes sense. Let’s say that you have a two-minute sales video. There is a huge difference between someone who watches the entire video versus someone who only watches five or ten seconds of that video. Ultimately, you want detailed analytics. While platforms like YouTube do provide simple analytics (like the number of views), they often don’t go far enough. They won’t show you more granular data like how much of a particular video a specific prospect watched.
Next, that video platform should include calls to action. By referencing calls to action here, we mean more than something like a verbal call to action in the body of your video. In that circumstance, you may say something like, “Contact us at this email address for more information.” Instead, a call to action here is going to be more of an interactive or clickable button on or near the video that lets your audience members take some type of action. Moreover, that call to action button can be more than just a link to another website or document. By including a call to action, any sales professional or organization can increase their conversation rates from their sales and marketing videos.
Finally, that video platform must include branding. It should also exclude distractions. YouTube is a good case study here. While YouTube has massive scale, one of its flaws for salespeople and marketers is that it includes tons of distractions. Not only are there advertisements on the screen, but your competitors’ videos may be next to or below your sales video. In this type of situation, the best chance of a conversion is getting the viewer to click on a link in the video description. They may also follow some directions that you call out in the video itself, but the bottom line is that taking some additional steps is much more difficult than it needs to be. By contrast, on a video platform, it is your branding and your branding alone. There are zero other distractions, making it much easier for the viewer to focus on you and your message.
Key Features of Video Platforms and Exploring Dubb
As you can see, great video platforms have plenty of characteristics that can help you build stronger relationships with your prospects and generate more sales. These great video platforms can provide branding opportunities, the ability to include calls to action, and detailed tracking. Ultimately, they can get you one step closer to your sales and marketing goals.
The specific video platforms that I’m thinking of are Wistia, BombBomb, Vidyard, and Dubb. These video platforms can give you the power to create a central hub for your videos, customize the video player, including branding, and more. At the same time, they also have some key differences.
To see all of these elements in one place, I want to take a closer look at Dubb. While I may be biased, Dubb is a fantastic video platform that can help you accomplish your sales and marketing goals.
To illustrate this, let’s take a look at a Dubb video landing page. If you haven’t yet heard of a Dubb video landing page, it is essentially a central hub for your Dubb videos. Upon creating a video within the Dubb ecosystem or uploading an already-existing video to Dubb. Once you do that, Dubb will automatically create a video landing page for you. You can customize your video landing pages however you’d like. For instance, you can easily include your company branding, custom URLs, and colors.
One of the best parts about Dubb landing pages is that you can include plenty of different calls to action. Like I mentioned above, calls to action are so powerful because they can help you and your colleagues get much closer to a sale. With Dubb, you can include all types of call to action buttons below your specific video on your video landing page. Some of those call to actions include the following:
- Booking an appointment on your calendar: With Dubb, you can integrate your calendar booking tool (like Calendly and Book Like a Boss) on your video landing page. This way, if a prospect is interested in learning more about your product, service, or company, they can easily book an appointment on your calendar.
- Communicate over Facebook Messenger: Sometimes, your viewer or prospect may not want to provide personal information. In this case, you can include a button that lets your prospect communicate with your company over Facebook Messenger.
- Send a video reply: Video replies are fantastic ways for your viewers to communicate back to you once they have watched your video. They can also be used as ways to gather video testimonials, which are outstanding ways to build social proof for your business. We highly encourage you to leverage video replies on your Dubb video landing pages.
- Follow a link: This is one of the more basic calls to action, yet it can create massive value for your organization. You can include virtually any link to a call to action button. This can be everything from a link to another blog post to a link to a purchase page. The choice is yours.
- Download an eBook or white paper: Finally, this can be a helpful call to action if you are displaying a video to someone at the top of your sales funnel. Really, you can include any digital asset here and hook it up to a call to action button that is below an introductory sales video.
These five options are just some of the many ways that you can leverage call to action buttons within the Dubb ecosystem. No matter what your sales or marketing goals are, I highly recommend that you use them.
On your Dubb video landing page, you will also notice that you can leverage an exit intent popup feature. You have probably interacted with these popups in your general Internet browsing. Basically, they are popups that appear when you are trying to exit a webpage. While you may find them to be annoying, they give you one last chance to engage with a viewer or prospect. Even if you won’t necessarily click on them, you never know who may. In other words, it is yet another way to convert a specific prospect or viewer.
Better yet, Dubb landing pages offer zero distractions. This isn’t like YouTube, where you have to compete with so many other videos and competitors. Rather, you can display your own branding, have your viewer focus solely on your video, and offer plenty of different ways to advance and strengthen the relationship. Pretty cool, right?
Comparing Dubb with the Other Platforms
Considering all of this, what about the other three video platforms? Like I mentioned, they include some common traits, including the ability to use your branding on your video landing page, customize the video player, include calls to action, and more. That said, there are some key differences here.
For instance, in some of these other video platforms, you will notice that the call to action buttons are different. For instance, using other video platforms, you may not have as much flexibility as you would when using Dubb. Those other platforms may offer link-based call to actions, meaning that you can only attach a URL to a specific call to action button. Sure, your viewer can engage with that URL, but Dubb actually goes one step further. By becoming a Dubb user, you get some extremely customized call to action option buttons. I touched on some of those options above, but there are plenty more. While URL redirection is useful, Dubb gives you the power to interact with your viewers in more interesting ways.
From here, let’s return to this idea of a video platform. As a reminder, a video platform allows multiple products to be built within the same technical framework. All four of the video platforms I mentioned have the same core products. For instance, they offer Chrome extensions to help their users create video content. They also offer tools to help those users customize their video content. That being said, BombBomb and Dubb have a whole different set of features that offer an all-inclusive video platform.
Specifically, I’m talking about the ability to broadcast these videos. Both platforms have marketing automation software that makes it extremely easy to distribute your videos at scale. You can send out either automatic email sequences, drip sequences of emails, and/or bulk sends. For instance, you can include these sequences as part of a newsletter (which is something we often see at Dubb). You can make your drip sequences and automations as complicated as you’d like. For instance, you can make one that has a whole bunch of conditional logic so that you can deliver the most customized experience possible. On the other hand, you can choose to make an extremely simple drip sequence that engages your viewers and audience. Whatever the case may be, you can do so with these two tools.
Going Forth and Selecting Your Video Platform
A video platform has all of the features you need to leverage video for your business. They let you easily create videos, customize those videos through branding and calls to action, and (as a secondary objective) distribute those videos. You may have all of these tools already. For instance, if you are using marketing automation software or a CRM tool, you may be able to send out your content to selected individuals on an email list. If that is the case, Wistia and Vidyard may be a good option for you.
That being said, we can’t have this discussion without talking about pricing. While the pricing is pretty close among all four of these video platforms, you are getting a little bit more with Dubb. Specifically, you are getting more with the call to action options and some of the page customization features. If you would like to learn more, I encourage you to check out some other posts on our blog. There, we take a much deeper dive into some of the similarities and differences between Dubb and those video platforms. For instance, we talk about things like the functionality of the Chrome extensions, some of the differences on the backend of each website, and more.
In the end, no matter which tool that you decide to use, I encourage you to get started today. A video platform can be a massive benefit for you, your colleagues, and your organization. Using the features that we discussed above, you can supercharge your sales and marketing work, build stronger relationships with your viewers and prospects, and generate more sales. To put it another way, a video platform can help you accomplish your goals—whatever they are. I can’t wait to see what you create!
At Dubb, we love thinking about topics like video platforms for business. Whether you want to further discuss an idea in this post or simply have questions about Dubb, we encourage you to contact us. You can also click here to learn more about Dubb and click here for a free 14-day trial of our premium plans.
Get a Free Account on Dubb!
Create actionable videos and pages that help grow your business. Free trial with no credit card required. Well… What are you waiting for?