New Wistia Channels Features: Grow a Brand Your Audience Won’t Forget
In case you missed it, last month during our Change the Channel live-streamed event, we announced a super exciting method to build better, longer-lasting brands called Brand Affinity Marketing. But, that’s not all we announced at the event! We also released new product features and updates to help brands build their audiences and grow their brand affinity with video. It’s safe to say it was an action-packed event — one that required a lot of action-packed steps to get us there.
As we were working on our product roadmap leading up to the event, we saw an opportunity to be our own best customer. To build products that helped us grow our own brand affinity, we sought to satisfy our own team, first. We believe that every business should own the viewing experience to create long-term, meaningful relationships with their customers, and we were inspired to develop new features to make Wistia Channels the best way to showcase your most valuable video content.
Our newest Channels features help you curate a branded audience experience. They put you in control over the look and feel of your videos and the viewer experience; help you turn your viewers into Subscribers with email capture forms; and, like the savviest media companies, get the most value from each video. We’re pretty pumped about these updates and hope you are, too. Let’s take a look at what these new features can help you do:
Create a binge-worthy experience your audience will love
Wistia Channels turn your series of videos into a beautiful, brand-forward, immersive experience with tools that allow you to customize the look and feel to best suit your brand. It’s super easy to feature your logo prominently across an eye-catching background video or image, hook viewers with a unique trailer, and make sure the entire series is on-brand with your fonts, colors, and selected thumbnails. We wanted to make sure that we gave you everything you needed to ensure your branded content doesn’t feel like advertising. With Wistia Channels, you can turn your viewers turn into binge-watchers and binge-watchers into brand advocates. Pretty sweet, right?
Market like a media company to get more from your videos
During Change the Channel, we also touched on the importance of brands marketing their content like a media company. Now, you might be wondering what the difference is between how conventional brands market content and how media companies market.
“Media companies keep the best content on their own channel and leverage social media to build their audience and drive viewers back to them.”
Let’s break it down a little bit: Where a brand sees one video asset, a media company sees potential for 10 video assets. Where brands post their content to all media platforms — owned, rented, and paid — looking for engagement metrics dictated by the platform, media companies keep the best content on their own channel and leverage social media to build their audience and drive viewers back to them.
From one video, a marketer of a media company will create a number of trailers and clips to spread across their universe of owned, earned, and paid media to where they get the most value — on their own site or Channel.
With Wistia Channels, you can manage a set of videos for the same project, like the full-length version, trailers, or clips and then post your compelling trailer to your Channel. Then, you can create target ads on social media to drive folks right back to your own Channel; it’s super simple!
Provide a better experience and get more viewer data
You’ve heard us say it before and we’ll likely say it again: video is the best way to make a lasting impact on your audience and build your brand affinity. We think if brands are working hard on videos to earn brand equity that they should get to own that value — instead of giving that audience interaction to third-party platforms. With Wistia Channels, you can engage and delight your audience on your terms, without any social media company’s branding, cat videos (unless that’s your thing!), notifications, or competitors’ videos to distract them.
“Video is the best way to make a lasting impact on your audience and build your brand affinity.”
And once you’ve earned an invested viewer, our new Channel Subscriber feature helps ‘em stick around for even more content. This tool lets you capture high-intent viewers’ email addresses, export them to your CRM or email marketing platform, export them as a CSV, or send an on-brand email notification for upcoming videos directly from your Wistia account. Whether you want to schedule an email or send one right when your new video is published, Channel Subscribers lets you email your audience — something you can’t do with YouTube Subscribers or other social media audiences.
With Wistia Channels and Wistia Subscribers, it’s easy, intuitive — and even a little bit of fun — to turn a page on your website into a showcase for your most valuable, engaging videos.
Grow your brand and get started today
Wistia Channels is available across all of our plans, and we have tons of resources to help you get started. Need a little inspiration? Check out our Customer Stories for the best ways to showcase your valuable video. And, of course, there’s our Brand Affinity Marketing Playbook,the step-by-step guide for turning viewers into brand advocates.
