The UK Chancellor, George Osborne recently confirmed that filming of the next Star Wars movie will take place in Britain, with the creative and tourism industries benefiting the most from the move. With this in mind we consider hotel video marketing as an innovative and compelling approach for forward thinking hoteliers.
The argument for video - top 10 reasons
1. The personality and warmth of a hotel is best conveyed through live action and a video that is produced to a high standard will win bookings over hotels of a higher grade without video.
2. 89% of travel shoppers stated that travel related online video influenced their travel purchase decisions.
3. A good hotel video will be shared with friends, family and business contacts through social networks. Nothing else has the power to go viral as quickly and effectively as video.
4. Google and other search engines give priority listings to websites that host video content.
5. By 2014 over 90% of web traffic will be video based and with web connected TVs growing in number it's easy to see why.
6. Companies using online video for promotion have seen sales lifts of 20-40%.
7. Visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than those who do not.
8. Website bounce rates dramatically reduce when there is video available. Depending on the quality of the video you could hold a website visitor on your website that much longer.
9. More than 65% of the people who watch online videos are between the ages of 35 and 64 (and 67% of these earn middle to high incomes).
10. Web visitors would much rather indulge in a video experience than read text or scroll through an image gallery. Your hotel is an experience and your marketing communications should be too.
Like any marketing tactic the key to getting the right results is good implementation. More often than not this means great creativity, and certainly video can benefit hugely from innovation and cutting edge ideas. In the hotel industry there are too many videos that are little more than glorified slide shows, which is a shame when you consider all of the technology that we have at our disposal. But, more than this it is about telling the story in an engaging and powerful way. We should be taking our cues from the movie and television industries. What do they do to draw viewers in and keep them hooked?
The argument for video - top 10 reasons
1. The personality and warmth of a hotel is best conveyed through live action and a video that is produced to a high standard will win bookings over hotels of a higher grade without video.
2. 89% of travel shoppers stated that travel related online video influenced their travel purchase decisions.
3. A good hotel video will be shared with friends, family and business contacts through social networks. Nothing else has the power to go viral as quickly and effectively as video.
4. Google and other search engines give priority listings to websites that host video content.
5. By 2014 over 90% of web traffic will be video based and with web connected TVs growing in number it's easy to see why.
6. Companies using online video for promotion have seen sales lifts of 20-40%.
7. Visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than those who do not.
8. Website bounce rates dramatically reduce when there is video available. Depending on the quality of the video you could hold a website visitor on your website that much longer.
9. More than 65% of the people who watch online videos are between the ages of 35 and 64 (and 67% of these earn middle to high incomes).
10. Web visitors would much rather indulge in a video experience than read text or scroll through an image gallery. Your hotel is an experience and your marketing communications should be too.
Like any marketing tactic the key to getting the right results is good implementation. More often than not this means great creativity, and certainly video can benefit hugely from innovation and cutting edge ideas. In the hotel industry there are too many videos that are little more than glorified slide shows, which is a shame when you consider all of the technology that we have at our disposal. But, more than this it is about telling the story in an engaging and powerful way. We should be taking our cues from the movie and television industries. What do they do to draw viewers in and keep them hooked?
