It’s been said, that if a picture is 1,000 words, a one-minute video is worth 1.8 million words. With video accessible on nearly every social media channel, website, app and platform, that fact is magnified even more as 2018 comes to a close. It’s time for marketers to simply accept the fact that video will continue to grow even more in the coming new year.

But why do marketers need a video marketing platform to keep up with video growth? We found that 82% of marketers planned to produce more video this year and 77% planned to increase their video marketing spend. Yet, 85% of marketers are still either tracking their video manually or not tracking video at all.

Which is why we’re covering the 5 vital reasons marketers need a video marketing platform in 2019 to take their video marketing to the next level:

1. Properly Power Video on Your Website

2. Own Your Video Data

3. YouTube & GDPR

4. The Advantages of Video SEO

5. Webinars = Video

Our 7 Keys to a Complete Video Marketing Strategy in 2019 broke down the best tactics for marketers to run video, but this blog will focus on how a video marketing platform can help implement those strategies to produce results from video.

1. It’s Time to Properly Power Video on Your Website

It’s nearly 2019, yet there are still many businesses that use third-parties like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter to host videos on their website. Not only does that limit the data that is collected from video, but it also hinders the ability to use video to its fullest potential.

Our Video Tools allow marketers to go beyond the limitations of other hosting services. With a branded player, video hubs, video landing pages, and the ability to use forms/Collectors on videos, marketers can finally run video on their website how it was meant to be run.

With the rise of video across the funnel, it’s more important than ever to have tools that brand your hosted videos, convert users with video, and track their behavior across an entire website. These tools enable and empower marketers to do just that.

2. Own Your Video Data

Data and user behavior is gold to any marketer trying to prove ROI. But video has often been left out of the equation for many businesses. While YouTube and Facebook are valuable channels for brand awareness, their limited data when embedded on a website reduces the scope of ROI that marketers need for attribution and lead scoring.

With a video marketing platform, marketers can integrate their video data directly into their tech stack. Whether that’s HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, or Google Analytics (and many more), it’s paramount to enrich your data through video audience data. By collecting leads through video or integrating to your stack, this data can be set up in a few minutes with a video marketing platform.

3. YouTube & GDPR

An oft-repeated fact is that GDPR was implemented in Europe in May of 2018. Since then, marketers around the world have scrambled to be compliant with all of the regulations and rules of the new law that protects user data.

By only embedding YouTube videos on a website, marketers are exposing themselves to GDPR regulations. YouTube embeds on your website are automatically adding 5 cookies without the consent of the user, (if you don't place them behind playwalls) then giving that data away to the United States and Google. One of these cookies has the job of tracking and telling the location of the device for 30 minutes.

As a European based video marketing platform, we’ve taken this issue very seriously and updated all of our video embeds, collectors, and data to be fully compliant with all GDPR aspects. You can find a breakdown of the steps we took and why we think GDPR can empower video marketers.

4. The Advantages of Video SEO

According to Inc, “videos are 53 times more likely to generate a first-page ranking than traditional SEO techniques.” By optimizing videos on both YouTube (the second largest search engine) and your website, it can increase organic traffic to your content. But how can marketers effectively use video in SEO? We’ve identified 5 different tactics that a video marketing platform can help with driving video results:

Video Descriptions

Through a video marketing platform, marketers can write descriptions that range from 150 characters all the way up to 1,000. For more top-of-the-funnel awareness, our integration with YouTube allows you to distribute video from one central place, thus enabling your video to be run everywhere, with the proper keywords. 

Use Tags

The one-word tags associated with keywords can trigger notifications for search engines that are crawling your content. It’s important to research those words that are being searched, which will also allow you to build a video hub that is organized and searchable on your site. 

Setup a Video Sitemap

Sitemaps can become quite complex to create, host and update. Video marketing tools can help alleviate this issue by providing the much-needed infrastructure for sitemaps. Plus, get rich-snippets (those beautiful thumbnails beside your videos), that attract all the attention and give you more visits and more sales.

5. Webinars = Video

While webinars have been a staple of marketing departments for years, the tools available have often been siloed and employed fragmented processes. We released our new Webinar tool - as a stand-alone product or integrated into our video marketing platform - with the mission to change webinar tools.

Webinars should be measured and hosted just like any other video on a video marketing platform. Our webinar tool runs in-browser and automatically uploads the on-demand recording to your website. Webinars gives marketers just one tool to run their video and webinars. From analytics that actually matter to full control over the design to integrations, it’s given marketers a webinar tool they can finally love.