Limelight Networks reports that just over 50% of bandwidth usage in the US is online video. That’s a 107% growth in video bandwidth over last year, what an incredible statistic. Today very few Australian resorts and serviced apartments are using online video to capture this ever growing market, why? Is it the production cost, inability to quantify return on investment, or don’t you think it’s needed?
My wife and I are currently planning a family holiday in Asia. We’ve found ourselves spending more time on YouTube than any other search engine. Watching video’s of shortlisted hotels has been the closest way we’ve found to get a realistic expectation as to what the facilities and location are actually like. Video is here to stay. More and more users are turning to YouTube as their preferred search engine with Youtube now reported to be the second most popular search engine behind Google. Youtube is more popular than Yahoo and Bing.
Mobile phones are becoming a popular way to consume video content on the go. For the past three years mobile data has nearly tripled, that's a lot of mobile data usage growth. Cisco reports that video was 49.8% of mobile data at the end of 2010 and is predicted to grow to 52.8% in 2011. YouTube is delivering 200 million video views per day to mobile devices.
It is true, in the past, a professionally developed video could quickly double the costs of any marketing project. I’ve seen businesses spend a small fortune on the creation of a marketing video, but as technology changes, hardware and software costs are reduced, it’s becoming more affordable for every resort. You only need to do a quick search on Google to see that number of companies offering this service is quickly increasing. Competition will quickly force the reduction in costs. I think you’ll be quietly surprised how affordable your own resorts video can be.
I won’t lie, quantifying the return on your investment in this medium is difficult, here’s a few reasons why.
- Video is used to convey a message, a story. The story is written to invoke an emotional connection, creating excitement, happiness, WOW, all difficult to measure.
- Measuring improvement to the resorts brand is intangible.
- The success of a video is usually measured in views, or the number of times the video has been shared.
- Usually the formula to calculate ROI is “spend X, viewed Y times, made Z sales” but who’s to say a guest didn’t watch your resorts video on YouTube and then book with an online OTA.
With network technology increasing and bandwidth costs decreasing, video is only growing in popularity. What is your resort, serviced apartment doing to capture this ever growing video market?
