9 Handy Wistia Features for Video Marketers

Whether you’re a current customer or new to Wistia, one thing is certain — video is quickly becoming an essential piece of the marketing pie. If using a single platform for all of your video marketing needs sounds appealing, you’ve come to the right place. We’re here to tell you all about the most useful Wistia features for marketers like yourself.

From easily customizing videos to match your brand to providing a TV-quality video experience, there are several benefits to using Wistia for all of your video marketing needs. Without further ado, let’s look at some of the top Wistia features marketers love and how you can get the most out of our product.

1. Ad-free video hosting

When it comes to owning your audience, your website should be the home base for all of your brand content. To establish a direct connection with your audience, hosting your videos with Wistia is the first place to start!

Compared to hosting your videos on free sites like YouTube and embedding them on your website, Wistia offers an ad-free experience for viewers. And, YouTube recently added the Right to Monetize to its Terms of Service, which means they can now show ads on all videos across all Channels. How would you feel if an ad popped up after a video that’s embedded on your website?

“Compared to hosting your videos on free sites like YouTube and embedding them on your website, Wistia offers an ad-free experience for viewers.”

With Wistia videos, you don’t have to worry about an ad interrupting your audience’s viewing experience or an ad for your competitor popping up out of the blue.

2. Video player customization

Wistia also allows you to customize the appearance of your video player. This handy feature adds an extra brand touch that doesn’t go unnoticed!

Set your thumbnail to an enticing image pulled from your video or let Wistia create a looping video to capture your audience’s attention. You can include your own custom branding by uploading your company’s logo, and you can even add a link that allows viewers to link to your website while watching your video. This logo would live in the top left corner of your video.

Additionally, changing the player color is the simplest way to make the Wistia player your own. Select the color you’d like from a color picker or input a hexadecimal color to get your brand perfectly on point. Limiting the spectrum of player colors can also help you pick from color options that are accessible and high visibility for folks with visual and/or color impairment.

3. Video Chapters

If you want to enhance the viewing experience of your long-form or short-form content, you can easily add chapters. Help people navigate through your jam-packed videos with valuable content to get to the things that are most interesting or relevant to them with just a few clicks! Try out chapters for yourself in this video example below.

4. Turnstile email collector

As we mentioned, hosting your videos in Wistia can help you own your audience. Our Turnstile feature collects emails right from your video, making it easy for you to gate content and drive qualified leads to your favorite marketing tools like HubSpot, Pardot, MailChimp, and more. In other words, collecting emails with Turnstile helps you establish a direct form of communication so you can nurture relationships over time.

“Collecting emails with Turnstile helps you establish a direct form of communication so you can nurture relationships over time.”

You can customize when you want Turnstile to appear in your video, and you can control the entire experience. Turnstile has options to display a form discreetly on hover or pause the video to capture your viewer’s attention. Plus, it works on any device a visitor is using.

5. Video links and Calls to Action

If you have a specific action you want viewers to take, adding a Call to Action at any point during your video is super simple. A Call to Action is a clickable message that directs folks to exactly what you’d like them to do next.

Alternatively, you can give video viewers a quick nudge with Annotation Links. These handy call-outs appear in the corner of your video as it plays, making it easy to give viewers additional content without interrupting the flow of your video.

6. Advanced video analytics

Another handy feature for marketers is our powerful video analytics. With Wistia, you can track audience behaviors with engagement graphs, viewer-based tracking, and video heatmaps.

Discover who’s watching your videos, how much they’re watching, and what type of content provides the most value for your business. Seeing which parts of your video folks watched, skipped, or rewatched will help inform and drive your video marketing strategy.

The data doesn’t stop there! Our video data tells you the percentage of viewers who clicked play, percentage viewed, total time watched, CTAs clicked, and more. Social stats will also show you how your videos performed on social media.

And if you want to sync your video data with other analytics platforms, no problem-o. We integrate with top analytics providers like Google Analytics, Databox, and more to help you connect the dots between your marketing campaigns.

7. A/B testing

Built-in A/B testing is another sweet feature that helps you identify what’s working in your video strategy by putting two videos head-to-head.

After you pick two videos from your Wistia account to test, you’ll get insights about their performance. Want to test more than just your video thumbnails? With this feature, you can easily test customizations like Turnstiles, CTAs, Annotation Links, and video length — the possibilities are endless!

Plus, the set-up is a breeze. Say good-bye to never-ending spreadsheets. Once you’ve selected two videos, we’ll generate a fresh embed code to run the test. Simply paste it on your site, sit back, relax, and let Wistia display your videos at a 50/50 split to all of your viewers.

Once you’ve started your test, you’ll see stats like Unique Views, Play Rate, Play Count, Engagement, and Actions appear for each video. When you’ve collected enough data, you can end the A/B test and choose the winner. The winner will show for all viewers going forward — without having to replace the embed code.

8. Audience growth with Reach & Retarget

Our Reach & Retarget feature can help you create custom audiences on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and more to drive engagement and growth. Whether you want to reach an entirely new audience or retarget to video viewers, Wistia seamlessly feeds this data over to third-parties to build custom lists.

Based on viewing data in Wistia, you can create personalized audiences and nudge viewers to take action based on video data. For example, you can quickly set up ads targeting folks who:

• Watched less than 25% of one video
• Watched more than 50% of one video
• Watched more than one video

9. Beautiful video Channels

Finally, we’ve made it super easy for you to build a beautiful, Netflix-style viewing experience to showcase videos on your site with Wistia Channels. Embed your videos in a binge-watchable format that encourages viewers to spend more time with your brand. The best part? You don’t need any development experience or resources to bring your Channel to life!

“Embed your videos in a binge-watchable format that encourages viewers to spend more time with your brand.”

Channels also have customization options like adding your own branding, picking light or dark mode, uploading a custom background with a static image or looping video, and choosing your content layout to display as a carousel or grid.

You can also capture subscribers right from your Channel. Remember what we said about owning your audience? When they’re on your lists, you can send them notifications about new episodes or exclusive content to keep folks coming back for more.

All in all, Channels can engage your audience with TV-quality experiences they know and love and make your brand stand out from the crowd.

Put your brand’s best foot forward

Whether you’re just getting started with a video strategy for your business or you’re a video marketing pro, these nine features only scratch the surface of what Wistia can do for your brand. If you want to explore more of our product and find out how it best fits your needs, feel free to get in touch with us! It’s time to put your brand’s best foot forward.