Where are you videos right now?

For many marketers, the answer is the same three places:

1. Homepage of your website
2. Social media
3. YouTube

These are tried and true host locations for improving retention and engagement that B2C companies, in particular, are familiar with. But when it comes to your video marketing strategy, many B2B brands may fall outside of this equation. What if social media isn’t integral to your business? What if YouTube’s community doesn’t draw or appeal to your audience? Should your brand just abandon video entirely? For brands both embracing and avoiding video, there’s an often overlooked platform with an unusual structure that can provide opportunity outside of the normal video workflow.

A year before YouTube was founded in 2005, Vimeo came into existence with the slogan “Film with a passion,” and the intention of providing a digital community for filmmakers. Today, its mission hasn’t changed, and while its audience pales in comparison to YouTube (Vimeo averages about 7.9 million users per day, compared to YouTube’s 480 million per day), it has continued to develop its platform quietly. It has built an incredible space for content marketers—one where quality of content reigns supreme over ad revenue or promoted videos.

Understanding the Video Black Sheep

Just because they’re small, that doesn’t mean Vimeo isn’t mighty on occasion. For instance, when Instagram recently lost one of its famous modeling ‘Grammers to a controversy over Internet “authenticity,” she turned to Vimeo to host her explanations and goodbyes. When it comes to marketing, Vimeo holds a place in 20 percent of B2B video marketing. But what is it that sets the platform apart?

One of the key structural differences is that Vimeo is curated. Most of this happens at the user level—”collections” fill a similar space to channels on YouTube, aggregating associated content. But even within these groupings, there is a distillation of specific collections with recognized authority that serves the largest audiences. The most coveted and visible collection as such is called “Staff Picks,” and is curated by Vimeo’s administration. This curation is unaffected by any spending, which means the most visible content is entirely a matter of quality rather than ad spend.

In a similar way, Vimeo’s community is considerably distilled in comparison to YouTube’s, resulting in a largely more engaged audience. What Vimeo can’t always provide in volume of responses, it makes up for with a noticeable lack of unpleasant or off-topic comments. Videos are often given suggestions that can help improve successive content. In some ways, Vimeo comes off as a concentration of YouTube’s better qualities.

Focusing Video Efforts

Whether Vimeo is a tool to start your new video marketing strategy, or an additional tool to add to your existing workflow, there are a number of features marketers can take advantage of:

• Feedback, Contributors, and Free Focus Groups: Vimeo’s tight-knit community can do more than help generate some suggestions for your videos. A complex system of attribution, collections, and mentions makes it very easy for dedicated marketers to dramatically improve the visibility of their content at no cost.
• Authenticity as Commodity: Vimeo’s community encourages “authentic” content. This sentiment, combined with a lack of ads, results in viewers who may be more willing to watch through an entire video or engage with longer-form content.
• Privacy and Business: Robust tools for media management means that files can be stored and shared in a controlled way through Vimeo, allowing your Video account to also double for private B2B video projects.

Overall, Vimeo doesn’t pack nearly the same punch as YouTube when it comes to volume or advertising power. YouTube is a platform that absolutely can meet the needs of most any marketer, and integrates much more readily with broader promotional systems. But Vimeo’s concentrated community, curation, and tools encourages and enables marketers to improve the quality of their content overall, and in doing so opens up avenues for more effective video and access to a small but highly engaged audience.

For more insight into why and how video is important to marketing efforts, check out this free webinar on incorporating video marketing.