The high cost of “free”: Take control of your brand experience with a secure video platform  

Imagine this: Your target customer stumbles upon your brand’s video on YouTube and is really intrigued by what you have to offer. Perhaps they’re contemplating how your product or service will help them achieve a business goal, or the ways in which they can streamline their day-to-day operations with the help of your product or service. You’ve captivated them, right? Well, not so fast. In one fell swoop, the video pauses to buffer—or, even worse, an ad from one of your competitors starts running during one of the designated promotional breaks. 

Ultimately, a free-platform-only video strategy puts your brand integrity at risk and opens up the opportunity for you to lose important business. Read on to learn the top five reasons you should invest in an online video platform (OVP). 

Protect your brand reputation 

Free platforms offer you no control over the ads or recommended content that appear together with your videos. This presents a huge risk to your brand reputation since it is possible that your videos stand a chance of being associated with content that stems from competitors or contains inappropriate material. 

By investing in an OVP, you can own your image and ensure your brand takes center stage for your viewers. 

Control the user experience 

The ability to manage the user experience is taken away from you if your content is hosted on someone else’s site. For example, buffering issues of a certain platform puts your video at risk of losing its target audience. This, in turn, could lead to negative viewing experience being associated with your brand and impact the inclination of viewers to use your product or service. 

By moving to a secure video platform, you can provide a user experience that meets your quality standards. And you can even customize the look and feel of your videos to match your brand aesthetic and marketing goals. 

Reap the SEO benefits 

Videos are regarded as high-quality content and are rewarded as such in search results. But if all of your content resides on a free platform, you’re missing out on the precious “SEO juice” they present.  

By embedding the videos on your own site through a secure video platform, you can improve your SEO because you “own” the video file. 

Tap into the video experts 

Determining the right video strategy for your organization is important. But with free video platforms, you get no access to specialists who can assist you in determining the optimal video strategy for your organization. 

Invest in an OVP to gain access to highly trained specialists who are ready to offer guidance on how to maximize your video marketing potential. With this trusted support system, you can launch powerful campaigns without in-house technical expertise. 

Make smarter, data-driven decisions 

Free platforms can only offer surface-level analytics, which can’t be tied to specific prospects. Additionally, if you make an edit to a video you’re already hosting on a free platform, you risk losing all the video history and stats associated with it.  

With an OVP, you can leverage robust content performance and viewer experience data so as to gain impactful insights on the efficiency of your video marketing campaigns—and incorporate with your existing analytics solutions for deep-seated insights.