If images speak a thousand words, videos must speak millions (or 1.8 million a minute according to Dr. James McQuivey). In fact, statistics even show that people spend 2.6x more time on pages with video than those without and landing pages with video can increase conversion by 80%. That’s why video marketing is an important part of many online businesses. And Kartra, the powerful online platform that combines many essential marketing tools, happens to also host videos.
Before I explored Kartra’s video tool, I laid the groundwork for my art business, built my website, sent out an email broadcast, and created sequences to automate my funnel. And, while that is sufficient to get the ball rolling, I’m determined to explore everything Kartra has to offer… including video. However, I don’t have much experience with video platforms beyond streaming late night episodes of Friends.
Creating my content:
As a new business owner, I don’t have much video content. There’s the rare time-lapse video of me creating a painting, but not much else. Some businesses, like a personal fitness coach, may provide premium video content, such as a workout or exercise explanation. Or a leading-edge software company may provide demo videos on their product pages.
I decided for the purposes of exploring Kartra I would create my first video. Equipped with iMovie and a built-in webcam, I created a video about myself to include on my “about” page.
When exporting the video, I made sure to save it to a somewhat manageable file size. Kartra helps optimize your video size so it doesn’t bog down your bandwidth but starting with a smaller size always helps.
Uploading my video to Kartra:
To get to Kartra’s video uploader, I simply clicked “My Videos” in the main navigation. Once there, all I had to do was tap the green “+” button and I was in.
The first thing that popped up was the option to upload a single video or multiple videos. Because I came equipped with the one video I just created, I clicked “Upload one video.” However, if you have a video series that you want to upload all at once, the second option will work well for you!
From there, I simply entered the name of my video and categorized it. I was ushered to the video configuration page, where a series of drop-downs appeared. The first was to upload my video, followed by display, appearance, call to action and more.
It’s quite a simple process – I just followed the drop-downs in order. First, I uploaded my video which took a couple minutes. Feel free to spend that time making a sandwich, snapchatting your progress or a super-duper fast power nap, if you’re so inclined.
Then, I clicked on display. There were options for the video to be embedded within the page, or appear as a popup, as well as a fixed video size versus responsive. I chose to have my video embedded as part of my about page and opted for it to be responsive to match my page design.
Next, I clicked on appearance. The first thing Kartra prompted me for was a splash image.
Note: A splash image is a cover image that will appear over your video when it’s not being played. Without a splash screen, users would simply see a snapshot from my video (which isn’t all that eye-catching).
I quickly went into Photoshop and whipped something up with the name of my video on there and uploaded it to Kartra. Almost instantly, my new splash screen appeared over my video. The appearance drop-down also gave me the option to show controls (the play button) to my viewers, mute on start, auto-play, show social shares and more.
The only prompt that confused me was the “Select skin color” option. With so many filters on Snapchat and Instagram nowadays, my mind instantly thought this would apply some filter and make me look lighter or darker (or maybe even blue aba di aba di). After toggling through the options, I quickly realized this was not the case. Instead, it was to change the color of the play button.
Once I configured my appearance to my liking, I moved on to the call-to-action section. A call to action is an instruction for your audience to do something, like “Buy Now.”
The content of my video didn’t lend itself too much to a call to action. However, I did mention a few topics outside my site so I chose to add call-to-action links in my video so viewers could explore more of what I was discussing.
Note: Pay attention to the exact time in your video when you want to start and stop your call to action. This will be needed to actually implement it.
I clicked “New Call To Action” and was given five different options: opt-in, image banner, caption, caption + button, and social unlock. Each of these is its own form of a call to action. I chose to do a simple text caption that just linked viewers out with a hyperlink.
Note: I wasn’t able to use punctuation in my caption, such as an exclamation point, apostrophe, period, etc.
Once I had set my call to action up, Kartra gave me the option of tagging people, to allow me to automate later. I chose to tag people that had viewed my video all the way through because it shows they’re spending more time on my page and getting to know me as an artist.
Lastly, the final drop-down, “End Actions,” gave me the option to decide whether to just end the video, loop the video, play another video, or redirect to a URL. I chose to just end the video after viewing and hit “Publish Video.”
Now, I just needed to figure out how to place my video somewhere where people could see it.
Popping my video on a page:
While you can get the source code from your Kartra-hosted video, I chose to just use the Kartra Page Builder and place my video on my “About” page.
To do this, I added an empty section and dropped in a 60% width column (I didn’t want the video to be too wide). From there, I simply placed a video component into the empty section. At this point, the video was a blank screen used as a filler and needed to be edited.
So I went into the editor and selected my video from a drop-down menu. Kartra makes it incredibly easy, and even gave me the options to auto-play, show controls, mute on start and select skin color again.
And that was it. Hosting a video is SUPER easy using Kartra. In fact, it only took me a matter of minutes (about the same time it took to just save my video on my computer) to get everything set up. Plus, Kartra’s different functionalities all link together which made embedding my video a breeze.
The basic fundamentals of my site are all in place. Yet, Kartra still has a few more compelling features to sift through. Stay by my side as I explore Kartra’s remaining capabilities.
Next up:
Discover how to support your customers with Kartra helpdesk. Follow me as I build out canned responses, a live chat, a ticketing system, a frequently answered question page and more.
Fun to read and Kartra sounds like it is easy to use.
Hi Bill! Glad you liked our post! And our Kartra users agree with you – it IS easy to use! ;+)
Are you able to move ALL of your videos from Wistia and host them on Kartra?
Hi Lynnie! You can host as many videos on Kartra as your plan’s bandwidth allows =)
do videos on other platforms, such as wistia, vimeo and youtube count to your kartra bandwidth?
ty in advance
Hi Trev-Yo, that’s a great question! Videos hosted on other sites will not count towards your Kartra bandwidth limits.
Good article, I just learned that kartra is different in the sense you need to upload any videos this way before you can use them in your pages but once you get used to that it is actually easier to upload all your content at once. Thanks!