6 Hidden Wistia Features You Didn’t Know You Needed

I started at Wistia last December, and after a few months of working here, I realized I had only scratched the surface of the product. As I watched my coworkers help our customers and manage our own videos, I noticed they were using some shortcuts and tricks that I hadn’t picked up yet. I figured that if I could be in Wistia HQ and missing out on the little tips that would make my life as a marketer easier, then you might not be privy to all of Wistia’s lesser-known features. In this post, I’ll share six hacks that have made my Wistia workflow more delightful and efficient. ### Marketing hacks #### Chapter your videos with embed links With longer form videos, like webinars or other educational content, it can be helpful to break the content into different sections. This makes it easy for your viewers to skip around to the parts of your video that are most relevant to them. If your viewers are looking for information that you don’t mention until 15 minutes into your video, there’s a big possibility they’ll lose interest before they find it. That’s a bad experience for your viewer and a loss of engagement for you. Using embed links, you can create custom links for specific points in your video. Check out embed links in action in the example below.

“Using embed links, you can create custom links for specific points in your video.”

 

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This works well if you’re looking to link to various points in your video in the middle of some written content, or if you simply want to direct a viewer to a specific part of your video. #### Use a call to action to play the next video Marketers often want to make sure that their viewers are aware of relevant content that could entertain or inform. Using a CTA on your video is one way to encourage your viewer to take the next step. If that next step is another video, you can adjust your CTA to automatically load the next one on the same page. You can set this up in the Customize panel under Timeline Actions. In the CTA field, you’ll want to add in #wistia_ along with the video’s “hashed ID.” You can still use any message you want for the CTA, and the Wistia player will automatically pull in the linked video when your viewer clicks on it. #### Use email merge tags to learn about your audience Without Wistia, when marketers wanted to send an email and direct people to a video, they would take a screenshot of the video and add the linked image to their emails. Using Wistia’s video thumbnails, you can get the same visual effect, but also integrate with your email tool to start identifying which contacts are watching your videos. Wistia’s video thumbnails contain email merge tags. These little snippets of code associate the views on your Wistia videos with email addresses. You can view all of this data on the audience page in Wistia or integrate with your CRM to have access to it there.

“These little snippets of code associate the views on your Wistia videos with email addresses.”

To create a video thumbnail, navigate to the media’s Embed & Share menu and select Link in Email Campaign. You can select the email provider or marketing automation platform you’re sending the email from, adjust the size of the thumbnail, and then copy the embed code. Next, add that code into your email, and send to your list. As your contacts click through on the email and press play, you’ll see heatmaps associated with their email addresses and identified viewers on the audience page. ### Organization Tips #### Organize your account with Move & Copy This is a feature that I have used over and over again when I’m repurposing the same video and I need two versions. For example, let’s say I want to keep my video ungated on my website, but I want to add a Turnstile email collector to generate leads on a landing page. I need two copies of the same video. I want to keep my lead gen videos separate from the videos I’m using for awareness, and I need to keep the analytics separate too. Once I’ve made a copy of my video, I move it to my “Lead Gen” project, use the Customize panel to add in my Turnstile, and make any other changes before embedding it on my landing page. The Move & Copy feature allows you to move your videos from one project into another or make a copy of a video that is already in your Wistia account.

 

From Project Actions, you can select Move & Copy, and you’ll see a list of your projects. From there, you can drill into them to find the video you’d like to move, and drag it to the correct project. If you hold down the Command or Control key when you drag, it will create a copy of the video in that project. This is a really helpful tool for video agencies using Wistia, because you can transfer videos from your account (where you may want to keep them for proofing) to your client’s. #### Get into your account with a right click Have you ever been working on getting a video embedded on your site and wanted to check the settings in Wistia? Did you know that you can right click on your video and jump right back into your Wistia account? Neither did I. I discovered this while working with one of our customer champions. I noticed how quickly she was able to navigate between her video on her website and her account, and realized that it was thanks to this sneaky trick. The Open video in Wistia option is waiting to bring you back to your account in a flash. Try this out the next time you’re working in Wistia, and be amazed at how much faster you get your work done.

 

### Video creation #### Record a video with Wistia’s webcam This is a more recent feature that has made making videos much easier. Our community manager has used this to record quick introductions for our community members and has found it really helpful. We even used it to record a portion of our monthly product update! You can record a video with your webcam from within Wistia and have it ready to share right away. From any project in Wistia, you can click on Project Actions, then select Record. Your webcam will immediately turn on and begin recording. Using your webcam can work for company meetings you might want to record and share with other members of your team. It’s also great for sales reps who may want to record a short personalized message to reach out or say thank you.

“You can record a video with your webcam from within Wistia and have it ready to share right away.”

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These are only a few of the tips I’ve discovered in the past five months, and I’m sure there are plenty more. I’d love for you to try some of these features out and let me know in the comments how you’re using them. If you’re using any cool hacks that I didn’t mention, let me know that too. We can create a follow-up post with some of the shortcuts you’ve figured out!

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