Jefri Yonata — June 15, 2017 
You made an explainer video for your company, and you are incredibly happy with the final result. Now what?
For an explainer video to be actually beneficial for your company, the process can be long. An explainer video is a great tool that harnesses the power of visual and audio learning to deliver information about your company to the public. Explainer videos are good at that specific job, but they won’t be any use if you don’t know how to use them.
An explainer video is simply a tool for your company to use to climb its way up above the competition. You play a big role in getting the most out of an explainer video.
Like any video on the Internet, an explainer video’s content is very important. It needs to be informative about your company and what it offers, and entertaining at the same time.
The question is, how do you get people to watch your video? I mean, after all, a good video is nothing if nobody watches it.
The answer to that question is simple: You promote it like crazy. Your video needs to be seen outside of your website because, frankly speaking, your website probably is not as popular as you’d like it to be.
Here are some of the places where your video can get more exposure.
When to Use YouTube
Without question, YouTube is one big melting pot for videos of any kind. Tutorials, blogs, reviews, promotions, and explainers are all on YouTube.
YouTube is the big dog. 70 hours worth of video are uploaded every minute — which translates to more fluff and competition that you have to deal with. So ask yourself these questions:
- Is my audience base really using YouTube to find more information on stuff they’re about to buy?
- Will my video be good enough to stand out from the others?
Only if the answer to both questions is yes should you use YouTube as your main promoting ground. Otherwise, spend more of your resources on Vimeo and Wistia.
When to Use Vimeo
This is another platform that will help your video gain more exposure. Surprisingly, explainer videos are more popular on Vimeo than on YouTube. Explainer videos here generally receive more views and engagement compared to its red counterpart.
Vimeo is not nearly as large as YouTube, but the community is narrowed down to professionals and enthusiasts of various industries. That said, on Vimeo you are more likely to receive constructive criticism rather than hateful or suspiciously kind comments with shady links.
This means that if you are a B2B, Vimeo is the right place for your explainer videos.
Why You Have to Use Wistia
While YouTube and Vimeo are places to get more exposure, Wistia is the best place to host a company’s video for your website. Granted, you have to spend money to pay for the membership, but the ROI you get from Wistia is definitely worth it.
The analytics Wistia provides is far more detailed and rich compared to what you get on the previous two websites. Wistia is more business-oriented while YouTube and Vimeo are more social media sites that happen to hosts thousands of videos.
Here is a short comparison of Wistia and YouTube in terms of analytics:
Like any other content that relies on the power of search engines, explainer videos need to be optimized to gain an advantageous spot in search engine ranking pages.
The fact is, many marketers overlook videos as SEO content. Treating a video like an SEO tool can open up new ways to reach audiences that have never heard of your company before.
Ultimately, amplifying the search engine reach of your explainer video boils down to these three points:
Optimized Content
Optimized content means that the content of a video is helpful in general, but especially helpful for its target viewers. An optimized explainer video will be aimed at a group of viewers that share certain criteria, but the video doesn’t lose its value when viewers outside of that group watch it.
Captioning
A video provides a forum for addressing topics in a complete and natural way without text’s one-dimensional restrictions. The challenge is making the engine hear you. Breaking your words down to 1s and 0s is like using a universal translator to speak to the search engine.
Captions are stored in the video’s metadata and are readily available for indexing from the get-go. Including captions provides information to search engine crawlers so that they can better determine the video’s content and how relevant it is to certain keywords.
Sharability
Having your content shared will increase its prevalence in search results. Search engines see widely-shared content as trusted content, and therefore that content is more likely to be placed as the top result. Including social sharing calls in the video page is a good start to encouraging viewers to share.
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