By Ryan Gerardi, Founder & CEO, AutoConversion
When you display videos on your dealership website, the host that serves up those videos has one of the most significant and influential roles of the entire user experience. This is why in today’s competitive digital landscape, it is essential to ensure that your video hosting service is designed with your dealership in mind.
Video content isn’t necessarily hosted (and streamed) from your website where people are visiting. Most website providers don’t want to host your video content. And the savvy ones utilize third-party video hosting and streaming providers.
The reason is simple: Video files are huge, and the file size puts extra strain on the web servers, which results in a slower and less stable user experience
The Consequence of Using YouTube for Hosting Videos on Your Website
Probably the most common implementation of third-party video hosting is YouTube. And while convenient, this is not necessarily the best application for your website.
For one, by implementing YouTube videos on your website, you are effectively giving YouTube unfettered access to your website visitors. This is the trade-off for F-R-E-E.
A hosting provider like YouTube can aggregate data from each viewer’s history. This includes the touch points that lead a user to your video, as well as other behaviors and activities, including those on your website. All these data points feed into the algorithm that determines the viewer’s experience.
Do you think YouTube is designed to drive more of your relevant video content to those visitors, or more of its own relevant video content? You guessed it…the latter. That’s the price you pay for a free host provider such as YouTube.
As Flick Fusion COO Tim James explains, “You see it with YouTube all the time. When you watch a video, YouTube can force you to watch another video play, normally a commercial. YouTube controls the entire experience.”
Own the Data, Control the Experience
If YouTube can do this with its users, then why not leverage the same tactic with your users?
Well, when you are the video host…you can.
Access to deep information like this can not only enhance a marketing campaign, it allows you to expand on it. It can change a one-way marketing campaign into something that is dynamic and more personalized. It allows you, as the creator, more control over what content is served.
The more information you have about what brings a viewer to your campaign and how they are interacting with it, the better you can tailor the content to the viewer. It’s no different with video content.
As James explains in the video, “It’s always been just about content, content, content. We seldom take data into consideration.”
Utilizing the Data to Make an Equity Offer
In our latest installment of the video marketing series on how video can elevate your dealership marketing strategy, we provide an example of how dealers can utilize the data of their video host provider to provide dynamic and personalized video content to website visitors in an Equity Offer campaign.
Your video host has a way of knowing all of that information, matching that information, and simultaneously identifying who is watching your video, similar to your conventional digital marketing campaigns. Video networks work in the exact same way.
What are some ways that you are utilizing video to create more dynamic and personalized experiences with your website visitors?
About the Author
Ryan Gerardi is an automotive media & marketing professional devoted to being part of the great convergence in mobility tech and connectivity, exploring people, ideas, and technologies that influence how we are connected and the way we get around.
