Jet's Favorite Freesources: Wistia
Welcome back folks to another entry into our Freesources series. We also wanted to point out a new feature that we’ve added for our community members on the website - a directory and search function for our Insider posts that will help our readers find what they’re looking for, improve our organization, as well as categorize and aggregate information more effectively. If you haven’t seen the directory and search function, it’s on the primary Insider page HERE.
As always, if you just want to skim, or pick and choose what’s best for you and your pet business right now, you should join our free community and make the most of the resources, tools, advice, promotions, news, and more that we have available.
What is Wistia?
Right, onto the meat of today’s post. For those of you that haven’t heard of Wistia, it is a free software platform that can help pet store owners create, edit, host, promote, and track high quality professional-looking videos.
We’ll have a lot of data and analysis and suggestions on video for our community members in the next few weeks here, but it should suffice to say that if you have been on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram recently, or for the past few years, you’ve probably noticed the trend that video content has become much, much more pervasive. It’s everywhere. It’s the logical next step in the “visual revolution” that we find ourselves and our social media platforms in.
If your pet store marketing strategy doesn’t include some video, then your pet store and it’s audience are really missing out. Your video marketing doesn’t have to be mind-blowing, or even professionally produced (but what if it was?), but it has to be there. Whether it’s filmed on a $9,000 camera, a smartphone, or is just re-shared viral content, your audience wants to see it. Therefore, your pet store should want to give it to them.
Benefits of Wistia
We like Wistia because of it’s features, specifically the number of features that it provides for free. They are not a non-profit, so they do have pricing tiers, but the number of resources available to users for free is more than enough for a pet store owner to spice up their marketing content.
Controlled Branding
We talk a lot about branding and having a unified digital presence. Wistia fits right in, allowing you to add your pet store’s logos, control the color scheme of your video player, include custom thumbnails (small icons/pictures that your video shows before it’s played), and perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t have ads!
Integrations
Wistia is really cool for just this part alone. Check these free features out:
Connects with other marketing platforms including but not limited to Hubspot and MailChimp - we’ve got Insider and Freesource posts on each of these free resources for pet store owners!
Easy publishing to any and every social media platforms that your pet store might be using.
Data is trackable both on their analysis platforms, as well as on Google Analytics (we’ve talked about this Freesource tool as well).
Video SEO built-in for your content to improve your website’s search rankings.
Easy, seamless embedding into your website, regardless of which Website Builder you use.
High quality streaming, lightning-quick loading without buffering, that works responsively on any device.
These are just a few. The deeper you get into Wistia, the more you’ll see that you can use without having to pay a cent. Pretty cool.
Lead Generation
Want to get more people to contact your pet store via email, phone call, or contact form? Want viewers to be able to purchase the product you’re featuring? Wistia videos allow for easy buttons with calls-to-action that link directly to whatever you want your viewer to do: contact, buy, learn, subscribe, redeem, etc.
Soapbox
Soapbox is the Wistia version of personal videos via screen-recording. The free version includes features like transitions between screen capture, webcam, and screencast, as well as split-screen viewing. You can create unlimited Soapbox videos that include all of the above features - branding, clickable links, integrations.
Learning Center
Blogs, articles, and support for marketing, production, sales, as well as inspiration through their own community members are a good way to make build your skills as a video marketer.
Some Ways You Can Use Wistia
A few quick ideas off the top of our head about ways your pet store’s marketing can benefit from Wistia’s video platform:
Make a video with new product updates, features, overviews, and announcements
Use Soapbox to keep your pet store’s audience personally connected with you, the face of your brand
Stay aligned to your branding with additions to your uploaded videos like logos, colors, and thumbnails
Collect new leads and customers through clickable links and calls-to-action on your videos
Start a web-series talking about products in your pet store
Tell and sell your story to get more people bought in
Just a few to get your brain activated! Can’t give away everything…gotta keep em coming back…. If you want the full treatment, let’s hop on a call and see how we can help your pet store’s marketing strategy, and ultimately become an irreplaceable piece of your pet business!
Conclusion
Wistia is a great little platform for those just starting with video production. With paid plans you can really unlock some features that will drastically improve a product, brand, or company that’s video-loving, video-dependent, or video-dominant. As you’ll see in our coming Insider posts, becoming a video-loving business is a great idea.
There are other ways to use video to build your brand. Look at Instagram Live, Snapchat, Facebook Live, or even YouTube. These platforms all have great features that can create snappy, attractive, fast videos that your pet store can benefit from. But if you wanted to take the step up and create professional-looking videos for your pet store’s marketing strategy with some of those extra features, you’d have to step away from those platforms towards Wistia or something like it.
At Pet Engine, our experience with Wistia has been positive, albeit a bit limited. With our background and experience, we would classify ourselves as closer to professional videographers rather than amateur or beginners. For this reason, we use paid platforms like Adobe. Nonetheless, we’ve used Wistia in the past and definitely recommend it for any pet store owners interested in adding video content to their marketing strategy (hint: that should be everybody).
