Maintaining an active presence on YouTube is a great way to show off all that your hotel has to offer, widen your reach, promote your website and ultimately, drive bookings.
In today’s blog, we’ll look at three simple but effective tactics for converting more YouTube viewers into guests.
1: Add YouTube Cards To Drive Guests To Your Website
Adding a card is a great way to give your YouTube videos extra marketing clout. The feature works perfectly across devices and allows you to add a call to action to drive your audience to your website or encourage them to check out other videos on your channel.
Taking advantage of this tool is simple. To get started, go to your hotel’s channel Video Manager. Below the video you want to work on, click the arrow next to Edit and choose Cards from the drop down menu. You can then choose the kind of card you want to create, customise it, add in a URL if required and select whereabouts in your video you want the card to appear. There’s nothing to stop you adding multiple cards to one video, as long as it doesn’t compromise viewing experience. Keep your cards at well spaced out intervals and avoid using more than three per video.
2: Promote Your Hotel’s Website and Social Pages With End Screens
End screens are another YouTube marketer’s dream come true, allowing you to add a compelling CTA to the final frame of your videos. You can use them to prompt viewers to check out your website and social channels, encourage them to take a look at your other videos, sign up to your newsletter or subscribe to your YouTube channel.
To get started, go to your hotel’s Video Manager. Under the video you want to add the End Screen to, click the arrow next to Edit and select End Screen & Annotations from the menu that appears. You can go on to customise a template end screen from one of the three predefined themes, or create your own from scratch. There’s also the option to import a previous end screen from one of your other videos by clicking Import From Video and choosing an already-published clip.
3. Optimise Your Videos For Search
To ensure your video gets discovered by the widest possible relevant audience both on YouTube and the search engines, it’s important to optimise your video description.
Since contextual, long tail keywords have become ever more important to Google and YouTube SEO, longer and more in-depth video descriptions tend to generate higher search rankings. Don’t forget to include multiple keyword variations, being sure to make your first few lines as engaging as possible and including the most important information before the Show More link. Although longer descriptions are better for SEO, always keep your text easy to digest by breaking it up into small, bite size paragraphs.
Lastly, add a UTM parameter to your URL so you can monitor how many clicks your video generates.
Despite its potential to generate traffic and bookings, only a small minority of hotels are actively using YouTube as a marketing channel. Get a head start on your competition now by getting creative and using the above three tactics to attract more viewers, click-throughs and website traffic.
RELATED PAGES AND BLOG POSTS:
- 4 Video Marketing Tips To Maximise Views and Engagement
- How To Use Video Content To Boost Guest Engagement And Drive Bookings
- How To Climb The YouTube Search Results By Boosting Your Videos’ Watch Time
