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How to use Online Video Marketing in Tourism and Hospitality
According to Google (2011) 68% of business travelers watch TRAVEL related videos online. Among those, 68% are thinking about a trip. Also according to Google 46% of personal travelers watch travel related videos, vs. 36% just two years ago. Google/OTX, The Traveler’s Road to Decision 2011
When you add to that recent finding by SearchEngineWatch that latest Panda update from Google heavily favours sites with video content, reflecting consumer demand for online video, the message is clear. online video is very important for attracting traffic to your webiste
If You Build It, They Will Come?
Sounds like an easy task; show the location and its attractions, if it’s a hotel show the amenities, how the rooms look like, the food, post it on You Tube and voila!
But the phone doesn’t ring, and after two months your number of views is still at 27, most of which are views from your staff and friends.
This problem is pretty common and it’s not reserved only to small business and small hotel operators, even the big boys in the industry, with big budgets are struggling to find the right formula. Big budget is not a guarantee that your video will be successful.
Those videos can be of high production value, but they lack few key ingredients that can make them successful online. Producing for online delivery and social media is quite different from TV style commercials or from old style “corporate video” with your CEO in a suit and tie talking about mission statement and company direction.
The Secret Sauce
The recipe for success includes few different ingredients, but secret sauce is primarily in storytelling. In this testimonial video below, Connie Trathen explains why the Vue Grand Hotel’s video was so successful;
Now we’ve seen the success of nearly a year of having Wedding Reception video, that’s what inspired us and encouraged us to now do Conference Video…
With over 3,000 unique views thus far, the success of this video is not accidental, and these views are incremental, measurable and producing a constant flow of enquiries to the business.
Create Video That Works
To create a video that works, your producer has to have the following qualities, I’ll just number them, as this deserves a whole new blog post.
- Complete ecosystem – set of established procedures (from production, post-production to distribution)
- Proven record of running a successful video marketing campaign
- Networkability, as you distribution is online, your producer must be social media active
- Understanding of Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing
- Understanding of Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and impact of video on your Google search ranking (websites with video are 53 times more likely to appear on 1st page of Google compared to websites with only text – Forrester Research)
- Storytelling
- Creative flair
Online video has changed the rules, reducing costs so as to make video accessible to businesses of all shapes and sizes. And social media has enabled every business to become a publisher.
Last but not the least, your promotional video is easily repurposed into other media like blog (or vlog), or into testimonial video, or a training video. This is important as research also shows that travelers watch online videos in all phases of travel planning.
Travelers view videos online during all phases of trip planning both for business and for personals trips (start from Slide 24).
Finally, you can watch Vue Grand’s video below, and as Connie mentioned in her testimonial above, few months later they produced another video, “Vue Grand Conference Venue” with similar success.
Vue Grand Wedding Reception from VideoVault on Vimeo.
Video4Marketing blog is powered by Video Vault, your video production specialist.
“fast forward your marketing”
To market, to market…
Welcome to our Video4Marketing blog. This is a place where we’ll show and tell about success stories (if you prefer “case studies” then we’ll call it like that) involving businesses and organisations that use video in their marketing mix.
We’ll also talk about problems and challenges your businesses are facing in this new Web 2.0 world, rich media, social medial new world and new rules and how to overcome them.
There is an evident shift in todays marketing and overall business to business (B2B) communication; everything is moving online; blogs, vlogs, email marketing, mobile marketing, social media…
For businesses and organisations who relied mainly upon printed media and that big yellow book, this is new and scary world.
In this blog, I’d like to try to answer your questions and demistify all that conundrum.
However, online world as it is, would be a to big topic, so we are going to focus on video in marketing and PR, but you’ll see that video has its role in most of your online communications.
Video, apart from having it on your website, can be sent by email, you can embed it in your blog or vlog.
Further, you can embed it in your Facebook post, even in your Tweeter.
But why? Why is video everywhere?
Simply because it is most effective way of communication, it’s the second only to personal presentation or conversation. Conversation… you must have heard that word recently; the trend is to try to involve your customers and prospects in conversation instead of selling or pitching (or preaching) to them.
video4marketing! 