Lights, camera, action – take your hotel marketing activities to a whole new level with hotel video content.
Creating hotel video content is a great way to promote your hotel property, engage with potential customers, drive traffic to your website and ultimately increase hotel bookings. With the popularity of video hosting communities such as YouTube and influence of social media, hotel internet marketing teams ideally should use a mix of traditional marketing tools and online channels to stay relevant in today’s virtual market.
1. Deciding on hotel video content
The type of hotel video content you produce will depend on the size and scope of your hotel and your target audience. A smaller establishment such as a bed & breakfast may focus on local community events and their staff while an international hotel chain such as the InterContinental Hotels and Resorts Group which produces exceptional hotel videos may have a global video strategy. Here are some ideas for hotel video content:
- videos displaying hotel accommodation and facilities
- videos highlighting conference meeting rooms
- videos showcasing wedding reception venues
- videos promoting events held at the hotel
- videos about the location or local tourist attractions
- videos interviewing a selection of hotel staff members
- video testimonials or reviews
2. Producing your hotel videos
If you manage a small hotel, you may be able to get away with taping your own hotel videos but an international hotel chain may need to hire a professional to do so. Tamara Lohan, chief technology officer and founder of leading hotel review website Mr and Mrs Smith had this to say about producing hotel videos in an article on travel technology website Tnooz:
“Done well, video can be the best online experience you can have – as long as the content you provide is rich, engaging and smoothly delivered. For us, it was a great way to build on our brand credibility and enhance consumer trust, with the ultimate aim, of course, of driving conversion.”
3. Uploading your hotel video
Firstly you need to decide whether you want to host your video on your website or upload it to video hosting sites. If you host the video on your website, you are driving traffic directly to your website but if you host it on a third party website like YouTube, you are receiving a backlink from these sites which can also boost your Search Engine ranking . Some of the main video hosting sites include:
- Dailymotion
- Metacafe
- Bing Video
- Google Video
- Tube Mogul
- Vimeo
- Yahoo Video
- YouTube
- and many other hotel video websites
Keep in mind that if you syndicate your hotel video to a site like Tube Mogul, this may compete with the Search Engine rankings for the videos hosted on your website and it may cannibalise your VSEO efforts (see below).
4. Hotel VSEO – optimising your hotel video
Once you have created a quality video and uploaded it, it is equally important to leverage videos and maximise your video ROI through hotel VSEO. The purpose of video optimisation is to make sure your message is seen, drive quality traffic to your hotel website and capture new hotel enquiries and bookings. Ways to optimise your hotel videos and fast track them on Search Engines include the following:
- optimising title tags/URLs /video file names
- writing keyword rich anchor text in descriptions
- submitting a video sitemap to Search Engines
- adding a transcript file to videos if appropriate
5. Promoting your hotel video
Once you have created your video and you are happy with the production quality, it is essential to promote it through as many means as possible. The viral nature of hotel videos means that your promotional message can be distributed much farther than conventional methods of advertising for less outlay. Promote your videos by taking advantage of your own hotel assets such as:
- the homepage of your website
- social media properties
- enewsletters and corporate materials
- sales DVDS
- video podcasts and
- other promotional material.
6. Analysing your video statistics
Once you have uploaded your videos to a video hosting channel like YouTube, you can start analysing your hotel video content. Every video community will have a video analytics program such as YouTube Insight. Measuring campaigns is one of the most important steps of hotel marketing. With YouTube Insight you can find out the following about your campaigns:
- measure user engagement and observe how many times viewers rate, favourite, or comment on your videos
- track the views and popularity of videos including a heat map of where video views are coming from
- find out the demographics of the people watching your videos such as age and gender
- discover how people found your video for example the search terms on YouTube or Google
- see what specific parts of your video holds the most interest for your audience.
Hotel video marketing gives you the opportunity to add another dimension to your online marketing activities and enables you to engage with your target audience in a more personal and intimate way – video content allows people to emotionally connect with your hotel brand. Contact us to find out more about hotel video content and how you can make it a key component of your internet hotel marketing strategy.
