How do you choose between Vimeo vs. YouTube for business? By looking at how each platform could serve your business needs best. Lots of vendors call themselves video platforms, but each do wildly different things for different audiences. Some video platforms are best to help beauty bloggers monetize and others can help marketers drive leads or entertainment execs build streaming services. We’ve rounded up the pros and cons of using Vimeo and YouTube to help make the choice a little easier.
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Comparing Vimeo vs. YouTube for Business: What’s Best for You
We’ll explain the differences between YouTube and Vimeo—two of the most popular video platforms out there—and tell you more about a third option you may not have thought of: a video platform that’s built specifically for business.
Vimeo vs. YouTube for Business: Key Features
Each of these platforms are used by different people for different things. YouTube is a social media site that helps viewers discover videos. Vimeo is a video hosting platform for organizing video playlists. Depending on what you are selling or what your business is, sometimes it can be hard to determine whether to use Vimeo or YouTube for business.
One good way to start the process is to list out your business needs and ask yourself a few questions.
Who is my target audience?
Am I looking for a place to just post and host my videos or am I looking to interact with my audience?
If I want to interact with my audience, should I build a YouTube channel or a website?
Audiences on each platform are different, so it’s best to note what each platform can offer and go from there.
What can be confusing is that there’s some basic feature overlap between Vimeo and YouTube.
Both platforms allow you to upload videos, measure views, and create playlists. But each platform also does a few important things that the others cannot.
Benefits of YouTube for Business
YouTube is by far one of the most popular platforms for people to upload videos to and because it has been around for over a decade, it has a wide variety of audiences and a plethora of stats to back up any of your data-based decisions.
The popularity of user-generated lifestyle videos, mixed with demo and how-to videos, has grown exponentially over the years. It has proven whether you have a small or large budget, you can have successful videos on YouTube. How you define success as a business user is what you should be looking at. Does having high view counts and lots of comments matter to you, or does click-throughs to your website or shopping portal rank higher? Are you looking more for a social media-like space where your audience can engage with your content? Do you care about having ads pop up in and around your videos? These are definitely questions worth asking when thinking about your video marketing strategy and whether you should build a YouTube channel or a website.
Here are just a few of the “pros” of using YouTube for business:
Recommend your video to two billion users
Run pre-roll ads before your video starts playing
Engage with your audience in the comment section
Can be integrated with other online video platforms like Vidyard
Benefits of Vimeo for Business
Vimeo is a video hosting platform that generally houses higher quality videos than those found on YouTube. It is marketed towards the arts and creative industry but has found a foothold in the business user market as well. Vimeo allows hosts to password-protect videos, which is great if you’re only sending to specific contacts. The downside to Vimeo is that it doesn’t have the large user audience and sign on rates that YouTube sees.
Some of the pros of using Vimeo for business are:
Help monetize both videos and live streams and reach a paid audience with built-in features
Different user levels and payment plans
No ads
But these two options, Vimeo vs. Youtube for business, also have their downsides, chief of which is that they’re a place for all video content, regardless of the creator, quality, or intent.
What Does a Video Platform Built for Business Offer?
On the flip side, a video platform that’s built for business can offer you a whole lot more. That’s where a solution like Vidyard comes into the mix.
Vidyard is a video marketing platform that helps both B2B and consumer businesses drive and measure pipeline and revenue all within the platform. It can also integrate with tools you already use like YouTube and Zoom to hit all of your business needs.
We know that video viewing data is a critical sales enablement tool. Nearly 90% of sales professionals report the importance of accessing video viewing data to qualify leads, engage prospects, or influence deals.
Vidyard offers the ability to go beyond just view counts with video analytics that help you track video engagement, learn more about your audience, and turn views into results. Beyond hosting your marketing content, it can also be used as a communication tool across your entire business.
Benefits of an Enterprise Video Platform Like Vidyard
Integrate with your CRM and marketing system
Capture user-level data
Score leads or accounts for marketing
Alert sales reps about views on their videos
Measure video return on investment (ROI)
Personalize videos based on CRM data
Let sales teams send and track videos
Let support teams send and track videos
SEO-optimize and transcribe videos
Vimeo vs. YouTube vs. Vidyard: Which One’s Right for You?
With so many features to review, how do you choose the right video platform for your business?
Of the three, Vidyard and Vimeo share the most features. Both allow viewers to control the look and feel of their players, but Vidyard is designed to make video useful throughout your entire organization—from marketing to sales to support to internal communications—whereas Vimeo is oriented towards helping consumer marketing teams monetize their videos to consumers on, say, a smart TV. Many of Vimeo’s features cater to influencers while Vidyard focuses on businesses.
Both platforms allow teams to embed, share, and track videos, and to customize their video player. But only Vidyard integrates with sales and marketing systems, offers ROI analytics, and makes it easy for sales teams to send one-to-one video.
YouTube stands alone in that it’s a social media platform first and a video hosting platform second. A whopping 1.8 billion people go there to watch everything from how-to videos to full movies, comment on content, and interact with other users. It’s built around an algorithm inspired by slot machines and designed to get viewers lost in a vortex of fascinating footage (cue cat video montage).
Yet for businesses, YouTube has some downsides: YouTube makes money by selling pre-roll ads, content suggestions at the end of videos, and side screen offers. All of which you can’t always control, and which could even be for your competitors. It also limits the data you can view. For companies trying to convert leads and accounts, it provides little insight.
The Bottom Line: While YouTube has a huge potential audience, only Vidyard integrates with sales and marketing systems, and offers ROI analytics. But, you can get the revenue-generating benefits of a video marketing platform like Vidyard and a social network like YouTube by using them together.
But, you can get the revenue-generating benefits of a video marketing platform like Vidyard and a social network like YouTube by using them together.
Combine Vidyard and YouTube for the Win
Vidyard and YouTube make a great pipeline-driving pair. Marketers can upload short teaser videos to YouTube which link back to their website where the full video is hosted by Vidyard (which integrates with your YouTube channel).
This way, marketers hitch a ride on YouTube’s powerful recommendation algorithm, which shows videos to the people who are most likely to enjoy them, and marketers get all the granular data and lead-capturing benefits of Vidyard once viewers land on their website.
When viewers watch a Vidyard-hosted video, you can:
See how much of the video they watch, and what parts they rewatched
Trigger actions, such as alerts to the sales team
Capture leads with post-roll forms
Score the new lead or account
Measure the video ROI
For most businesses, a combination of Vidyard and YouTube offers the greatest mix of discoverability and convertibility for turning traffic into pipeline. So, despite tens of thousands of Google searches, the question isn’t “Should I use Vidyard or YouTube?”, it’s “How can I best use Vidyard and YouTube together?”
This post was originally published on April 22, 2019. It was updated on December 22, 2020.
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