5 Simple Tips For Successful Video Marketing

Posted on May 8th 2018 in Hotel Marketing

From news to YouTube tutorials, Snaps to Instagram Stories, Vine and endless cat clips, video is the most popular form of content on the internet. In fact, it’s expected to account for as much as 82% of all internet traffic by 2021.

For marketers, video represents one of the most engaging and immediate ways to get in front of the right audience online, but for many, it can also be one of the most challenging to produce.

If your hotel is ready to tap into the huge marketing potential of video, here are 5 tips to make the process less daunting.

1. You Don’t Need A Hollywood Budget

Video marketing has a reputation for being expensive. And it certainly can be. But the truth is; you really don’t need a Hollywood sized budget to produce professional quality videos that drive tonnes of views and engagement. Sure, you might want to put your hotel’s most important promotional videos (a guided tour for example) in the hands of a professional video marketing agency with access to high quality lighting and editing equipment, but there’s a lot you can do with simply a Smartphone camera and some readily available and inexpensive software – it just means getting creative. For example, your audience are sure to appreciate a sneak peek “behind the scenes” of life at your hotel, or a series of light hearted themed interviews with staff, both of which are ideas which can be shot with very little investment.

2. You Don’t Need To Memorise A Script

Having a script can help you stay on track and ensure you come across as professional in your videos, but at the same time memorising everything you want to say word for word can cause your video to feel somewhat robotic, or at least less authentic than it would otherwise.

We recommend a simple approach of bullet pointing your main talking points before you start filming and rehearsing them so you have a clear grasp of the message you want to convey and can keep “umms” and “errs” to a minimum.

3. Do Include A CTA

Since the key purpose of your marketing videos are to drive your audience to action, it’s important to include a CTA, just as you would in a blog post or piece of email content. Do you want the people watching to subscribe for more video content? Visit your website? Book? Like the video or share it? Let your audience know, either by embedding CTAs in your videos, using bumpers with links in the video descriptions, telling them within the video themselves, or a combination of all these strategies.

4. Do Ask Someone To Play Director

If you’re working with a low budget, it’s very likely you don’t have a camera operator or director to help you out.

It’s not necessary to start looking to hire someone to fill that role. However, simply asking a colleague or friend (even one without video experience) to press “record” and “stop,” and keep an eye on how things appear behind the camera can prove surprisingly valuable and save you a lot of editing time.

5. Do Tap Into SEO Potential With Video Transcriptions

By nature video has limited crawlable text, making it less SEO-friendly than other forms of content at first glance. Fortunately, there’s a workaround. By including important keywords and phrases within your videos and transcribing these videos when you embed them on your hotel’s website, you’ll gain SERPs traction by giving Google plenty of text to crawl. Don’t forget to add optimised headers for maximum search visibility.

Video marketing means stepping into unchartered territory for many properties, but if you’re willing to get creative and put the work in, the payoff can be content which engages, inspires and drives bookings.

How does your hotel use video? Let us know in the comments below!