5 distinctive advertising and marketing options from Vimeo
Video marketing has exploded in the past few years. 54 percent of consumers say they prefer to watch videos from the brands they support than other content types. If you want or want to immerse yourself in video marketing, you need to be familiar with Vimeo.
Developers and marketers use Vimeo in different companies to create and share videos. As with YouTube, all types of businesses can use the platform to grow their business, including small businesses, e-commerce, social media marketers, educators, fitness professionals, and creative professionals.
Does Vimeo have marketing potential and is it suitable for your company? Or is it just another platform that is taking up your time and not offering any return?
Here's what you need to know to find out if Vimeo is right for you.
What is Vimeo?
Vimeo is a video sharing platform that gives businesses and professionals the tools they need to create, share and market high quality videos. The platform has more than 200 million users, 1.5 million paid subscribers and over 100 billion video views.
What makes this video platform so popular?
The platform enables creators to record, edit, and customize high quality videos with features like text, music, and calls-to-action.
It also offers a range of collaboration tools, workflow features, privacy settings, and detailed analysis to help you understand which videos your audience likes.
In addition to interviews, the Vimeo developers also publish landscapes, music videos, training courses, augmented reality, training videos, short films and even cute cat videos.
What features does Vimeo offer?
If you are looking for an easy-to-use, professional video platform, Vimeo might be the right choice for your business. Before you decide, though, let's take a look at some of the key features of Vimeo.
As with YouTube, developers can use Vimeo to record and host videos. But it also does a lot more. Here are some key features Vimeo has to offer:
- Record videos, add text, music, and adjust colors, ratio, etc.
- Post-production and collaboration tools to streamline video creation workflows, including version history, time-coded notes, and real-time responses
- Data protection features including password protection, viewer permissions, and data security
- customizable video players, end screens and speed controls
- Customizable channels with editable headers, thumbnails and URLs
- Call for actions, including clickable buttons and video interaction cards, to send viewers to your website, landing page, or other URLs
- Advanced metrics including video engagement graphs, average view time, live stats, and total games
Note: The basic free version of Vimeo limits access to advanced tools, including some metrics, privacy features, and storage options. However, the free version is still very useful!
How much does Vimeo cost?
If you are on a tight marketing budget, Vimeo is an ideal choice for video marketing.
Unlike YouTube and other video marketing alternatives, there are no paid ads so you don't have to spend thousands to reach your audience.
Vimeo is pretty affordable, with a robust, free forever plan that lets you:
- Upload up to 500MB per week
- Store up to 5 GB of data
- Use basic embedding functions
- View basic video analytics
- Download converted video files
- Access limited privacy regulations including "Just Me" which keeps your videos private
- Upload up to 10 videos per day
- Create a channel, group, and three showcases
- Publish videos natively to social and ecommerce accounts
Paid Vimeo accounts are also affordable, starting at $ 7 per month if billed annually for their Plus version, and going up to $ 75 per month for the Premium version.
Is Vimeo worth the cost? Let's see how you can use this video editing and sharing platform to grow your business.
How do I use Vimeo for business?
Vimeo can be used by any company interested in taking advantage of the power of video marketing. Whether you're a local plumbing company looking to share customer reviews or a million dollar marketing company looking to share training videos, Vimeo lets you create, host, and share videos with your target audience.
Remember, Vimeo is not just a video hosting platform, it's a community too.
You can search for other videos, leave comments, and even create custom playlists of your favorite videos. Not only do videos stay on Vimeo, but they can also be published natively on platforms such as Facebook or embedded in landing pages or on your website.
Here are some use cases for the platform:
- Training videos with your team or users
- high quality product videos
- Look behind the scenes of your manufacturing or creation process
- Video testimonials from satisfied customers
How is Vimeo different from YouTube?
In terms of usability, Vimeo and YouTube are pretty similar. Both platforms allow you to upload videos, watch videos from other developers, go live (with the Premium plan only), create playlists, design a channel, view analytics, and connect with other developers.
The main difference between Vimeo and YouTube is in the audience. Vimeo users tend to be more creative and engaged.
Unlike YouTube, you probably won't be handling spam messages that don't add value. Vimeo videos tend to be more artistic and of high quality too.
Vimeo also has no ads. This makes it easier for developers with smaller marketing budgets to share engaging, high-quality videos with their audiences.
Note that live video is only available to Premium plan members. If this is important to you, consider using other platforms like Facebook and Instagram to go live.
5 unique marketing features from Vimeo
Now that you understand what Vimeo is, how it works, and what makes it stand out from other platforms, it's time to look into what its actual uses. There's no reason to waste time learning a new platform if it doesn't grow your business, right?
Vimeo differs from other video platforms through several unique marketing functions. Let's look at some of them.
1. Customization of the Vimeo channel and video
Branding is a great way to make a memorable impression on your audience. Colors, fonts, and logos help consumers see what to expect from your business and identify your brand across platforms.
Vimeo allows you to create a custom channel that is tailored to your brand by customizing the title, thumbnail, header image and description of your channel, and even creating a custom URL.
The channel page essentially serves as a landing page for your brand, where you can share videos, a description, and important links.
Here is the Content Marketing Institute's Vimeo page. Note that the header image is a video showing Content Marketing World, the brand's flagship conference.
Videos can also be customized by adding keyword optimized titles and descriptions, timestamped links, links to other websites, captions and unique thumbnails. The time-stamped links and internal links are beneficial as YouTube turned off a similar feature a few years ago.
Not only does these features make it easy to create videos that your audience will love (which is a huge plus!). In addition, companies can keep their branding consistent across all platforms.
Paid plans also have access to Vimeo Create, the video maker tool that provides access to photos, videos and the ability to brand videos.
2. Advanced Vimeo Analytics and Trends
Vimeo's analytics platform provides insights into demographics and user behavior, including impressions, games, likes, comments and your most popular videos.
It also provides an overview of the devices that videos are viewed on and shows which parts of your videos are getting the most and least user interaction.
Even if you publish videos natively on other social platforms, Vimeo monitors playback, likes, shares, and reposts so you can see which platforms are the most popular.
This data can help you understand what types of videos will resonate with your audience, so you can create more content that your users will love.
If you choose a paid plan, Vimeo gives you access to even deeper analytics to understand how your video marketing is driving business and what you can do to keep delivering valuable content.
3. Video optimization
Creating great videos is only half the battle – you also need to make sure your audience can find your videos through video optimization. With Vimeo, developers can create custom titles and descriptions, and choose categories so that prospects can find your content.
These features aren't particularly unique to Vimeo. YouTube also lets you tweak videos by adding titles and descriptions.
What is unique, however, is the impact these optimizations can have on your reach. This is because Vimeo doesn't allow creators to bid on keywords and outperform organic results.
For example, your competitor cannot bid on your brand name and excel your content by only paying for it. This feature makes video optimization in Vimeo vital.
The lack of sponsored content is a feature that sets Vimeo apart. So let's go a little deeper.
4. Free of sponsored content
The average internet user sees hundreds if not thousands of ads every day. From social media to your own email box, paid ads run everywhere we use the internet – except Vimeo.
With Vimeo, search is organic and there are no pre-video or mid-roll ads.
Unlike most social platforms, Vimeo is mainly monetized through paid memberships. This balances the playing field. Brand posts have to live and die on their own, which is pretty cool.
Smaller brands that publish content have the same opportunity to drive user engagement and views as big brands. This makes this platform an exciting platform for companies in all industries – even for companies with little to no marketing budget.
5. Working with other tools
Vimeo allows users to post and embed videos on other platforms or on social media. Vimeo also integrates with a variety of other tools, including Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor.
This means that you can take advantage of the power of Vimeo without ever leaving your current video editor and better track the impact of your email marketing campaigns.
For the tech-savvy user, Vimeo also offers an API that you can use to add video integration to your custom apps.
Conclusion
There are many video marketing tools out there that can make finding the most valuable tool a headache. If your content on Vimeo is high quality, useful, and adds value to your audience, you are likely to reach your audience as much as bigger brands.
Ready to create a Vimeo content strategy? Start by finding keywords that your audience is interested in and see your favorite content. Are any of these topics suitable for videos?
If so, write a video script, restart your camera, and start recording. Then use Vimeo to reach your audience. Make sure you optimize your videos and work with other developers to get the maximum impact.
Do you use Vimeo? What is the most valuable function for your company?