Video marketing is a great way to use social media to connect with your current customers or reach a new audience. Especially with growing, thriving smartphone market, more and more people are able to watch videos no matter where they are. Embedding video on your site is also a great way to encourage visitors to stay longer, at least until the video’s finished playing. We’ve gathered three online tools that will help you market your videos, and possibly launch the next viral craze…

You Need Content Compatibility

Our first suggested tool is a website. Encoding.com is a service that takes your video in whatever format you made it, and makes it compatible to whatever browser, mobile phone, or media program you’d like. Encoding.com also can host your videos, streaming them through HTTP streaming, which is designed to enhance play on iPads and iPhones.

It isn’t free service, but you can test it out for free for 30 days. And there are a variety of plans, from their Max monthly plan, if you’re a video marketing manic, to their Basic plan, for just $19.

Flash Quality Without the Hassle

Our second tool involves HTML5. HTML5 is coding that enables the video to play directly through the browser, so there’s no plugin or player necessary. This makes your video more accessible, and immediately watchable.
The drawback has been that using HTML5 meant using Flash, which was hard for search engine spiderbots to read, and wasn’t always compatible with older computers. mDialog offers a solution.

mDialog is a video publishing platform that can encode and serve video in HTML5, as well as provide you with some great ad features. The videos can play anywhere, from a mobile device to a PC, it doesn’t matter. You can also insert a roll ad into your video whenever you want to, you control the timing. There’s also demographic targeting available for you if you arrange for video ads through mDialog. The encoding and streaming of the videos is done through cloud computing, and it’s handled by the company so you don’t have to concern yourself with the technical aspects.

Platform for Your Performance

Brightcove is an online video platform that also handles HTML5, as well as compatibility issues, the mobile market and even offers video tracking capability and ad space. Your videos will reside in a cloud, and you can categorize them, set a playlist (which you can change up) and Brightcove handles playing them, no matter who is watching them from whatever type of device. And you can integrate the data Brightcove tracks with Google Analytics, so all your information about drop-offs and player interaction is in one place.

Deciding to go with one of these three video options will cost you, but if you want to make videos a larger part of your site or your marketing plan, getting the technical support, compatibility, and even ad support and space from one of these platforms is a smart use of your money.