‘Veni, Vidi, Video!’ — Salted Stone’s Dir. of Ops on Video Marketing and Becoming a Wistia Partner

Film director Barry Levinson once wrote that, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.” That’s why Salted Stone is excited to announce that we’ve entered into a new agency partnership with Wistia—a video marketing automation platform for businesses that combines video hosting, marketing tools, and analytics. 

Using Wistia, it’s possible to do cool things like:

• Secure and personalize your videos
• Drive meaningful actions through CTAs and email collection
• Boost SEO results by ensuring videos rank for pages on your website (not YouTube!)
• Generate new leads by capturing emails in your videos and sending them to your lists
• Increase ROI for your video spend

Video Marketing

Video marketing represents a very different approach to video than what’s practiced at most agencies these days. Whereas many agencies merely produce videos and deliver them to clients, by working with Wistia, Salted Stone is now able to integrate complete video marketing programs into broader marketing campaigns.

That is, rather than simply producing a video and slapping it up on a website, we’re able to use video in much the same way we use other content: to attract, engage, close and delight leads. 

Some of the cool features that appealed to us about Wistia in particular include:

• Video heatmaps and viewing trends which show which parts of your videos viewers watch, skip, or re-watch
• Trend graphs that let you track how your entire video library performs over time
• Easy embedding and sharing for posting videos and playlists on your website or for social sharing
• Engagement graphs to let you know how well videos perform and hold viewer attention
• Viewer history tracking to better identify the most engaged prospects in your audience
• IP Filtering of video data that ensures accurate analytics
• Video SEO through embed codes that completely automate search engine indexing
• Domain restriction for greater control over where your videos are viewed
• Calls to action that help turn passive viewers into active audience members
• Turnstile email collector that enables you to capture emails and names from people who watch your videos and drive qualified leads to your email list and CRM
• and way, way, way more.

We spoke to our very own Director of Operations, and former HubSpot team member, Sam Siskind, about Wistia, video marketing, and what becoming an Agency Partner means for Salted Stone and our clients.

How is video marketing different from the traditional approach to video?

Sam: Video marketing is about strategy, analysis and iteration. Video marketing aims to continuously optimize your videos so that they are as effective as possible at capturing and nurturing an audience. It uses the medium with specific purpose.

Tell me about Wistia.

Sam: Wistia is the best video platform on the market for companies that want to leverage video in their marketing programs. It perfectly blends a dead-simple user experience with analytics on steroids. It beats all other video platforms on reliable video playback on any device and has incredibly useful integrations. I've personally been using Wistia in some fashion for the past four years. It's the only video platform I'll recommend to our clients.

What does it mean to be an agency partner with Wistia?

Sam: The Wistia Agency Partner program is a concentrated effort by Wistia to partner with agencies like us, and to co-write the playbook on effective video marketing. They’ve put significant resources into the program, and have already built a great community of partners. Wistia is looking to match their clients looking for help implementing video into their marketing programs with partners that would be a great fit.

What kind of HubSpot integration does Wistia offer?

Sam: I worked at HubSpot for a few years, and during my time there, I actually helped work on the first version of the integration. With the two platforms integrated, you can seamlessly track every video view by your HubSpot contacts and capture leads straight from your videos. But these days, there are integrations with Marketo and Pardot.

We teamed up with the folks at Wistia to write the ultimate Explainer Video Guide!

Check out best practices for writing, creating, and distributing your audiovisual marketing pieces, and contact us today to talk video strategy.