9 Wistia Features That Make Your Brand Content Shine

When it comes to executing marketing campaigns and growing audiences, brand marketers should have a tool that supports all of their top-funnel initiatives with video. From driving website traffic and increasing blog visitors to gaining subscribers and encouraging social media engagement, Wistia can help you grow your audience and elevate your video efforts! In this post, we’ll highlight some pretty neat Wistia features and why brand marketers will love them. Let’s dive in!

1. Video player customization

To help you create a cohesive brand experience for anyone who visits your website, Wistia allows you to customize the appearance of your video player.

Instead of embedding a YouTube player on your website, you can put your unique branding first by customizing your video player’s thumbnail, changing the player color, and more! Plus, you can make changes to your video player in Wistia whenever you want and your changes will be reflected wherever your video is embedded on your site.

“Instead of embedding a YouTube player on your website, you can put your unique branding first by customizing your video player’s thumbnail, changing the player color, and more!”

For your video’s thumbnail, you can capture your audience’s attention with an enticing image pulled from your video or let Wistia create a looping video. You can also include your own custom branding by uploading your company’s logo and linking to your website to help drive folks back to your homepage. This logo would live in the top left corner of your video.

And, 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.

2. Annotation Links

Want to give anyone who watches your video a quick nudge in the direction you want them to take? Annotation Links are a handy feature! These 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.

Whether it’s blog posts or marketing guides, Annotation Links can help introduce folks to the valuable content your brand has to offer.

3. Channels

If you’re looking for a place to showcase all of your video (or podcast) content, Channels can completely transform your website into a super professional and sleek viewing experience for visitors. Channels has plenty of options for custom branding such as thumbnails, color schemes, custom font and logo, titles and descriptions, and the ability to add an auto-playing hero video. Plus, it’s a breeze to embed on your site — you don’t need any development experience or resources to bring your Channel to life!

Channels are also designed to encourage deeper engagement from folks. When visitors start watching a video, the Channel opens up a high-resolution, full-screen player that loads quickly to attract and sustain attention. “Next” and “Up Next” buttons also appear while videos are playing to indicate there’s more content to come and give a sweet preview. You can also break your content out into sections and categories to help people navigate to exactly what they want to see.

It’s also possible to capture subscribers right from your Channel. For growing and owning your audience, Channels can be the beautiful home base where all of your content lives while encouraging people to spend more time with your brand and keep them coming back for more.

4. Ad-free viewing experience

For both videos hosted on your site or in a Wistia Channel, we keep the focus on your content with completely ad-free viewing experiences. With Wistia, your video or Channel is part of your own website and doesn’t link out to promotional content or other sites … unless you want it to, of course. Either way, you’re in the driver’s seat.

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.

5. SEO-friendly embeds

Moving on to SEO benefits, here at Wistia we’ve got your video SEO fully covered. Wistia does all of the hard work for you to inject your video metadata onto your page to help improve your presence on search engines like Google. All you have to do is copy and paste.

For any video you upload in Wistia or in a Channel, you can manage important metadata such as updating the title and descriptions for your media. As long as you fill out the Name and Description fields (and get yourself some captions, if you’re feeling so bold), Wistia’s got the rest covered. Our embed automatically puts a video markup on the page for you so search engines can crawl your website to identify and index media properly.

6. Accessibility features

Along with helping you choose accessible colors for your video player, Wistia has a number of ways we aim to increase the number of videos that are accessible to everyone. Our player aligns with WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines for accessibility, and within Wistia there is an Accessibility Checklist in the Customize menu. Check it out below and see how you can make accessibility part of your workflow!

To give you a brief overview of how we make our player accessible, we’re compatible with screen readers and built to handle various assistive technologies. Additionally, we provide options for thumbnail alt text, visible player controls, audio descriptions, and captions and transcripts.

7. Mobile-friendly player

Whether you’re on iOS or Android, Wistia optimizes video playback for any mobile phone or tablet, making the viewing experience delightful — no matter the device.

Since large HD files eat up data, Wistia creates smaller, high-quality video files on all mobile devices for smoother mobile playback.

Any interactive elements you add to your videos also work flawlessly on mobile. Turnstiles, Annotation Links, or CTAs, and controls  such as playback speed or sharing restrictions  will always be shown to your viewers, on any device.

Your video quality will be just as high on mobile as it is on desktop, with adaptive streaming and support for 4K videos on iOS and Android. And Wistia videos will play inline on all mobile browsers and only convert to fullscreen if the viewer rotates their device to landscape.

8. Publish to social media

If you want to amplify the reach of your videos, our Publish to Social feature allows you to connect Wistia to your Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn accounts, providing the option to directly upload your video content to your social networks. By sharing your content natively on social, you can make use of the full functionality of each platform’s built-in video player to boost engagement with your content.

Oh, and did we mention you can measure all of those results for each video, in one place? With Publish to Social Stats, you can see how individual videos perform on different platforms, right within Wistia! For each video you’ve shared to social, you can see the number of views, shares, likes, and comments from LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

“With Publish to Social Stats, you can see how individual videos perform on different platforms, right within Wistia!”

9. Reach & Retarget

Finally, 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

Do what’s best for your brand

If you’re focusing on top-funnel initiatives and trying to get more folks familiar with your brand, these nine features can help you do just that. 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 get more eyes on your branded content!