7 Wistia Features to Help Content Marketers Simplify and Scale Video Efforts

Hello, fellow content marketers! Is your business investing in video to grow your brand? If that’s the case, you should also create a content strategy that’ll help you get the most out of your videos. After all, repurposing your content is key!

Whether your goal is to increase engagement with video content or turn your video assets into lead-generating machines, Wistia has the features you need to support your content marketing goals.

From one marketing team to another, we’re here to share how Wistia supports your video content efforts. Allow us to introduce some of our favorite features that can take your strategy to the next level. Let’s go!

1. Move and Copy

One feature we regularly use to embed videos onto our blog posts is Move and Copy. When it comes to repurposing content, Move and Copy in Wistia is your best friend. Essentially, you can move video content around your Wistia account without shifting everything around on your site. Use Move and Copy to reorganize your content without having to worry about changing URLs or embed codes.

“When it comes to repurposing content, Move and Copy in Wistia is your best friend.”

If you plan to use the same video on more than one page (like on a landing page and a blog post) and want to keep the stats for each location separate, you don’t need to upload the same video twice. With Move and Copy, you can create a duplicate with the customizations you already implemented.

We cannot tell you how many times we’ve used this feature on our own blog. For our series (Out of) Office Hours with Chris Lavigne, Move and Copy allowed us to copy videos from our series page to embed in blog posts supporting each episode. For one-off videos, like remote podcasting tips, we’ve used Move and Copy to repurpose videos for blog content to reach more of our audience.

Whatever videos you create, no matter where they currently live on your site, you can breathe more life into them through supporting blog content with Move and Copy!

2. Collaboration tools

Whether your team is near or far, Wistia makes collaborating on your video content easy. With time-coded comments, you can collaborate and proof videos with your teammates before putting your content out into the world.

For example, if you’re creating case studies or testimonial videos, you can pause your video in Wistia at a specific point to give your two cents. Not jiving with specific edits in your video? No problem! This tool will make your communication clear and efficient to get that video perfectly polished before it goes live.

3. Video Chapters

Another feature that’ll enhance your visitors’ experience is the ability to add chapters to your long or short-form video content. If you’re creating supplemental written content, chapters can also lay the groundwork for the structure of your blog post. By breaking your video into titled sections with a table of contents, chapters let your viewers know what’s coming up next and help them find exactly what they’re looking for!

For our video gear guide and our podcast gear guide videos, we chaptered each video into three sections based on the best gear for your budget — basic, intermediate, and advanced. We thought adding chapters would help folks jump right to the meat of information that applied to them most. Plus, using the chapters to shape our content structure made the flow of our blog post easier to digest for anyone who would rather read than watch.

Try chapters for yourself in the video below!

4. Annotation Links

For all of the valuable blog content you’re publishing, your team could use Annotation Links in their videos to get more eyes on your posts. Annotation Links discreetly display in the upper right-hand corner of videos for as long as you want. They’re a subtle way to give your video viewers links to more information without interrupting their experience.

Let’s say you’re trying to guide a prospect down the funnel. By using Annotation Links in your outreach videos, you can show you have their best interests in mind by providing posts with tons of educational value to help them succeed.

5. SEO-friendly embeds

Embedding Wistia videos onto your site or in your written content is super simple, and our Standard embeds are also SEO-friendly! 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.

“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.”

After you upload a video in Wistia, 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 a media properly.

6. Replace video

Once you’ve embedded a Wistia video anywhere on your website, making any additional tweaks as an afterthought is no big deal! Calling a developer won’t always be necessary with Wistia’s replace media tool.

There are two ways to replace media in Wistia — Overwrite and Swap. Overwriting media is intended for slight editing and quick fixes. Media that are overwritten will keep their stats — you won’t lose a second of data.

On the other hand, a swap makes it easy to place a completely different media in the wild without changing your embed code.

The Replace Media functionality is designed to cause the least disruption possible for your embedded media. So, while the replacement is uploading and processing, the old media will continue to play anywhere it is embedded. No stats or comments will be affected, and the media will update immediately after its finished processing.

For both Overwrite and Swap, all customizations will transfer (including the thumbnail) with the replacement. Captions, Lead Conversion Tools (Turnstile, CTA, and Annotation links), and any player customizations will remain the same.

7. Channels

Are you looking to adventure beyond written content and what’s expected from your audience? Perhaps creating a video series to support your brand is on your radar.

If that’s the route you’re interested in taking, our Wistia Channels feature can create a unique and sleek content experience that can help you get more folks to spend time with your brand. Simply embed a Channel on your site as a Popover or Inline embed. You can even customize the look and feel of your Channel to match your brand with just a few clicks.

Take a tour of our Channel for One, Ten, One Hundred below!

Channels is also a fantastic home for any of your existing video content to get found by your audience! Do you have a collection of explainer videos? What about a webinar library? You can create a binge-worthy experience for anyone looking to learn more about your product or service.

Unlike other video platforms, all of the content on your Wistia Channel is your own. You don’t have to worry about your audience getting annoyed by ads, distracted by unrelated content, or drawn away to competitor sites.

Up-Next

Within Wistia Channels, there’s also a neat “Up Next” auto-playing countdown that will indicate the next video is about to start. Encouraging your viewers to watch more of your content and spend more time on your site has never been easier.

Wistia is a content marketer’s dream

Whichever ways you use videos in your content strategy, Wistia can support your efforts and help you cook up new ways to engage your audience. If you want to explore more of our product and find out how Wistia fits your needs, feel free to get in touch with us for a personalized walk through!