Adding videos to your hotel’s social media mix is a great way to generate likes and shares, expand your reach and drive traffic back to your website.
Creating this kind of content needn’t cost you thousands of dollars for high end production. In fact, some of the most effective marketing videos shared on social media can be put together for very little money at all.
In today’s blog, we’ll tell you how to create social media videos without breaking your marketing budget.
1. Decide What Type Of Video To Create
When it comes to creating great videos to share on social media, there’s little need to spend hour upon hour brainstorming new ideas. Here are 3 simple but powerful suggestions to get you started.
Draw on User-Generated Content
You can generate some great video content without too much expense or effort on your part by handing over the creative reins to your audience. Encourage your guests to share their stories around a theme on YouTube and Facebook using your campaign hashtag. Eg #YourHolidayStories. If the response is big enough, you can then pick and choose the most engaging content and repurpose it into a memorable new video campaign.
As well as potentially saving you hundreds of marketing dollars, putting your guests behind the camera and in front of other online travellers is a great way to add authenticity to your brand voice.
Get Creative with Royalty-Free Content
If there is enough relevant content out there, aggregating royalty-free video and images from sites like Flickr and YouTube is another way to put together great new video content without eating into your budget and time resources. Say you want to make a video about outdoors activities in your area, for example. You can run a keyword search on Flickr for the key phrase ‘outdoors fun’ and see how many relevant and compelling images you could make use of in your videos.
Be Inspired By Popular Content Trends
Capitalising on a hashtag or video type that is already trending is yet another great approach to social video making. As an example, not too long ago there was a lot of buzz around the hashtag #DrawMyLife which was popular among celebrities and YouTube personalities. Several businesses successfully jumped on the bandwagon by creating videos that told the ‘story’ of their brand in the form of simple drawings, captions and/or voiceover.
Keep an eye on the video content that’s generating the most attention on social media. If you see a trend emerging, don’t be afraid to ride its coattails.
2. Create Your Video
Creating a video that people actually want to watch and engage with is not as difficult as you might think. It doesn’t require professional video editing skills, or super expensive production software, in fact a tool like Adobe Premier Pro is very reasonably priced and can be used to edit and build complex storyboards. If your budget is very limited, don’t forget YouTube’s Creator Studio. It makes putting together a simple video quick and easy, and best of all, it’s free!
3. Publish Your Video to Social Media
Now your video is ready, it’s time to share it with your audience.
As a first step, share the video on all the social channels you post to regularly, and be sure to optimise your video description and title with relevant keywords and hashtags when doing so. You might also create a new blog post with the video embedded within the article. If you want to get your content discovered by an even wider audience and have the budget for it, you could also consider using paid features on YouTube, Facebook and the other social networks to get your content seen by as many of the right people as possible.
Not every video has what it takes to go viral. However, taking time to create engaging video content regularly is a powerful way to connect with your audience and expand your reach online.
What do you think? Has your hotel experimented much with video content? Let us know in the comments below!
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