It happens almost every time we deliver the final video. We hear, “This looks great! So, uh, what do I do with it?” It’s an important question. With video assets costing anywhere from $5k–100k, you need to get the best ROI you can. Distribution is an essential part of that that, and which strategy you choose depends on a few things.

If you’re a B2C company with a fast buying cycle and lower cost product, you’re going to be most concerned with views. Getting awareness at scale is key. Your strategies, then, will revolve around social networks, video networks, and email campaigns.

But if you’re a B2B company with 5k or fewer potential customers, you’ll rely on targeted outreach using ABM (Account Based Marketing) or other direct outreach strategies. With these, you can leverage video to explain your product, retarget site visitors, and separate yourself from your competition. In short, your desired outcome + your audience = your distribution strategy.

Whatever your situation, ask yourself questions like these: – Do you need the video to drive awareness? – Does your video need to explain or bring clarity? – Is it justifying your case or converting customers?

As for assessing how well it’s performing, Wistia has a great guide to video metrics. Also, our friends over at Brite put together this handy little chart to evaluate if your video is working at its stage and, more importantly, how to fix it if it’s broken.

In this article, we’ll explore the best strategies for distributing video—YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, email, your company’s website and self-hosting options.

Regardless of channel, your company will need to engage with media buying. These networks are increasingly pay-to-play ecosystems. Even Facebook requires you to pay if you want to reach all your page’s followers. So, while we will touch on some organic strategies in this article, the results you can drive from that category are shrinking.

Speaking of organic strategies, let’s address everyone’s favorite: going viral. Unfortunately, videos that go viral organically are so few and far between that it’s not worth viewing that as a possibility, let alone planning on it. That said, by evaluating, analyzing, testing, and putting in work, you can drive video distribution that results in meaningful ROI.

VIDEO DISTRIBUTION ON YOUTUBE

While YouTube has faced serious competition from Facebook in the last few years, a YouTube-first video strategy still has strong arguments—and even stronger numbers. YouTube is 11.8x bigger than Facebook regarding video. In the US, people watch 8,000 years worth of YouTube video daily. Globally, that number swells to 46,000 years. 84% of Americans pick YouTube over Facebook for online video. Millennials are 18.5x more likely to watch videos on YouTube than Facebook. You can see the allure.

This segment of the article discusses:

• Different video ad types on YouTube and how to leverage them
• Targeting options available on YouTube
• How to set up custom audience targeting in YouTube

This content will most likely interest you if you’re looking to leverage a massive and diverse video audience. YouTube is a great option for any company—B2B, B2C, and even Non-Profits. Due to the educational nature of many videos on YouTube, you can set up content-based targeting for your services or for a very specific buyer circle. To dive into these topics further, click here.

VIDEO DISTRIBUTION ON FACEBOOK

With over 2 billion users on its network, Facebook is already a major distribution platform for video. Now that Mark Zuckerberg is turning Facebook into a video-first platform, the potential for video performance on Facebook is rising quickly.

To become video-first, Facebook is currently favoring video over other content. Organically, this means your video can get more views even without paying. From a paid standpoint, this means that you can buy views cheaper with video than with other types of media. While this will most likely not always be the case, you can use it to your advantage now. It is also worth noting that Facebook’s largest area of growth is with baby boomers, creating some really interesting targeting options.

This segment of the article discusses:

• Organic video distribution on Facebook and what kind of reach you can expect
• Media buying and the lengths and styles of video that work best
• How to set up targeting for video campaigns
• Custom audience creation and retargeting with video

This content will most likely interest you if you are doing any of the following: using sub-15 second video, looking for best practices for organic video distribution, looking to retarget and create custom audiences, using video to retarget on Facebook. To dive into these topics, click here.

USING VIDEO ON LINKEDIN

Out of all of the platforms, LinkedIn is lagging the most in just about every category, including video—a shame, because they have unrivaled business data.

They’re taking steps to move forward, such as allowing users to upload videos directly. However, this feature has not yet been rolled out to company pages, so this is an option only for individual users. Company pages can import video links, this doesn’t give you the same data that native uploads do.

This segment of the article discusses:

• How to leverage the new video features called LinkedIn Video
• How to set up organic product company pages using video as the main communication medium
• Using LinkedIn’s ad platform to drive conversions offsite from video on the landing page

This content will most likely interest you if you have high-clout influencers within your company, if you have a large audience on LinkedIn, or if you are interested in using video for lead generation on LinkedIn. You can read this article here.

USING VIDEO ON SNAPCHAT

Snapchat is a niche platform, but it’s one you can’t ignore if you’re targeting certain segments, especially the 18-34 age demographic. This ecosystem rewards quick messages focused on blurb-level awareness. Snapchat is useful almost solely for top-of-the-funnel content.

This segment of the article discusses:

• What Snapchat is and how it works
• How brands can leverage Snapchat
• What advertising options look like on Snapchat

This content will most likely interest you if you are a B2C brand or if you are trying to reach the 18-34 age demographic. Snapchat has very limited options for B2B brands or companies targeting a more mature audience. Read more here.

VIDEO ON WEBSITES / SELF-HOSTING

With free social platforms, YouTube, and Vimeo, why would anyone self-host? If you want the video to have the most impact on your business, you should look beyond native social hosting and consider the three main hosting players: Wistia, Vidyard, and BriteCove.

This segment of the article discusses:

• Self-hosting video analytics
• Self-hosting lead generation and CTA options
• Customization options when you self-host
• SEO options for self-hosting
• Hosting, security, and asset management within the self-hosting platforms

This content will most likely interest you if you are a company with a large amount of video assets and a highly trafficked website. If you’re using video to drive conversion on your site, you’ll want to discover how self-hosting can help achieve that goal. Read more here.

SENDING VIDEO VIA EMAIL

Now, out of all of the channels, email probably feels the least sexy and the most archaic. Does your audience really need more email? Does anyone really need more email, for that matter? The answer to that has less to do with email itself and more to do with value: does your content provide value to your audience? If the honest answer is yes, consider how you might create more value with videos distributed over.

A few quick statistics on what happens when you use video in email:

According to Hubspot, the highest-converting B2B channel is email 55% increase in click-through rates 44% more time spent reading emails 41% more email sharing and forwarding 24% increase in conversion rates 20% increase in ROI 14% higher average sales-order value The stats are pretty impressive. The results can be the same. Email is a great tool worth taking seriously.

This segment of the article discusses:

• The best ways to leverage & send video in email
• How to clearly set up a CTA within the email
• A brief talk on retargeting strategies from email engagement

This content will most likely interest you if you’re a B2B marketer looking to leverage email lists more powerfully or if you’re a B2C company with a large email list. What separates B2B brands is that their audiences can be very hard to find and target effectively, especially if the audience size is small. In such cases, doing direct outreach and channel expansion via email is crucial, and video can help improve results. Read more here.

In Conclusion

We know it’s a bit self-serving to say that video is king. But for pretty much any communication goal from sales to marketing to education to awareness and more, that’s the reality. Not only is video already king, but almost certain to become even more prominent. All of the social platforms algorithms favor video, and what’s telling is why they do: because people love video. This isn’t going to change.