The trend of using video on your website to market products or services continues to grow at an exponential rate. It seems like everywhere you go on the web, more and more people are moving towards using video to deliver content on their site, whether in marketing videos, blog posts, or information products.

There are many options available for streaming videos on your site, such as Youtube, Vimeo, Viddler, screencast.com, or using Amazon S3 servers with your own video player. Having used all of those options for different businesses, I can say that all of them are pretty good, but they all have their downsides, and none of them are as good as my favorite app for streaming videos. More on that in a moment.

Getting your videos to play well for everyone around the world, despite their location or internet connection speed, can be a very challenging, and sometimes rather embarrassing, task.

If you choose a video streaming platform that doesn’t provide a good playback experience for everyone coming to your site, you’ll be losing potential customers who leave your site when your video doesn’t play well.

You’ll also end up with a bunch of e-mails from people having trouble watching videos on your site, at least from those kind enough to tell you that something is wrong. Troubleshooting those problems becomes a major time sink.

And trust me, you don’t want to run into video playback problems during something as important as a product launch that relies entirely on videos to deliver your content. It’s happened to me before, and it’s a huge headache.

Video is a very effective, powerful tool for your business, but there are some key elements you’ll need to get right to use it without getting headaches.

First, it’s vital to get the viewing experience perfected. You want people to see nice, crisp, clean video playback that’s smooth and problem free. The challenge is that it’s not easy to get that result with most video platforms.

Second, when you use videos to market something, your marketing efforts will be much more effective if you can actually see how much of each video people are watching, where you’re losing them, or where they’re watching segments of a video multiple times. In other words, you need detailed video analytics.

That kind of information can help you shape future marketing videos to make them much more effective at convincing people to take actions like signing up for your email list, or buying something from you.

I’ve been through a lot of difficult, frustrating situations around getting videos to play well for people around the world, and I’d rather not see you have to go through the same kind of thing. If you want to avoid big problems with video streaming and get an array of features that can make your marketing efforts much more effective, the best video solution around is Wistia.

In the video below, I’ll take you on a quick tour of my own Wistia account so you can see what it’s like to use it and what its video analytics look like in a real world situation.

If you love analytics, like I do, you’ll fall in love with the kind of data you can see about how visitors are viewing your videos in Wistia.

And with Wistia, you don’t have to worry about viewer playback problems. They’ve nailed the playback experience. You’ll be able to play your videos to people around the world, even those with slower internet connections, with very few, if any, problems.

What do I mean by “few”? Well, the problems I had with videos not playing well during a product launch were because of problems with Vimeo Pro. We had 24 reports from people saying they couldn’t watch the videos, and those were just the ones kind enough to let us know. Very embarrassing.

In the middle of the launch, we switched to Wistia, and from that moment on we received a total of zero emails about the videos not playing well. (In the last year, I’ve seen one report of one of my wistia videos not playing well, but it was due to that person’s internet connection having a problem.)

When your videos look and play great on your site for everyone, you and your business look great, and video playback problems don’t get in the way of you delivering your message.

Now, the Wistia platform itself is fantastic, but they also have an incredible support team that you can e-mail or call on the phone.

Out of all of the video streaming platforms I’ve used in the past, I’ve never come across a company that’s open to hopping on the phone and working one-on-one with you to customize the settings for your account, just so you can get your videos to play the way you want, but the folks at Wistia do it.

In my perspective, a web app is only as good as the support you get from the company who made it.

In this regard, Wistia wins again. They know how to take care of their customers.

Watch the video below and come with me on a quick tour of my Wistia account.

And be sure to sign up for the free 14-day trial of Wistia and take it for a drive yourself. It’ll be worth your time, trust me.

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