HubSpot has a new feature that we're stoked to tell you about.
This year at INBOUND, HubSpot’s annual marketing conference, HubSpot announced their partnership with VidYard, a popular and respected video hosting site. This arrangement allows VidYard to bring a lot of capabilities and enhancements to Hubspot’s platform, so it is somewhat surprising that there hasn’t been a larger fuss made about this integration, especially with video marketing being so prominent right now. If you haven’t heard about this partnership, here’s what’s going on.
The first blurb about Hubspot video first comes up if you go to Marketing, Files and Templates, and then Files. On the top, you’ll see a blue box that says,
“Attract and delight your visitors with better videos. Enable the Vidyard integration to embed video files in your content, optimize them for search, and track their performance. Learn more.”
When you click “learn more”, Hubspot will actually tell you that you can upload video assets to the files folder without enabling the VidYard Integration. This is good to know, however all the true benefits come with the integration. If you have a professional or enterprise level HubSpot package, you get a complimentary VidYard subscription to use the integration-- however if you don't, a separate subscription to VidYard is required. This is nowhere in the upfront documentation, and I only discovered this knowledge upon researching further. Understandably, this may sway your decision of whether to proceed with the integration, but before your make your decision, you should know the benefits VidYard brings to the table.
THE BENEFITS
WIth VidYard, you can embed video files directly in your content this means on your landing pages, website pages, and even a self-hosted video player on VidYard directly. You can even embed into emails, but considering the top two email clients, Outlook and Gmail, don’t support email streaming in emails directly, it’s kind of a waste. The common work around for this is to put an image or GIF with a play button in your email instead.
FUN FACT: The play button is actually considered the most successful CTA.
Those in charge of branding and design will be happy to know that VidYard provides a totally customizable player. This ability to white label gives your videos a professional appeal and keeps it congruent with the with rest of your website. The Vidyard player also offers free automatic transcriptions, which is a nice feature to have, and provides optimal user experience. You can also A/B test various elements of the video including promotional copy, thumbnails, and CTAS.
With VidYard you can also optimize videos for search engines and conversions, as you are actually embedding the video directly on your site. By doing so, your video will share metadata with the web page itself, allowing search engines to index it. This means that your video is more likely to come up in search results if it addresses a specific question; if you were just linking to a video on YouTube, you wouldn’t get this benefit. This bonus isn’t just VidYard exclusive-- any type of site that has embedding and hosting capabilities can do this.
The main benefit here is that VidYard works seamlessly with HubSpot which you are already utilizing. By hosting the video through a HubSpot integration, you are able to measure video performance and capture analytics the same way you would with any other type of HubSpot content. This keeps all of your campaign assets on one unified platform, which is convenient for those in charge of monitoring and generating reports. Based on video activity, users can also be automated to segment into smart lists, the same way they would if they click a link in an email, or any other workflow action.
THE VERDICT
So now is the decision: do you take the dive and get a subscription to VidYard to enhance your experience in HubSpot, or do you explore other options for your video marketing ventures? While we can’t make that decision for you, we feel it is important to note that the more you consolidate and decide run your marketing through HubSpot exclusive integrations, the more you can really benefit from HubSpot. The platform definitely works best when it is using native extensions, so if you have a professional or enterprise level of HubSpot and get a complimentary subscription to VidYard, you should give these features a try!
