What is hotel video marketing?
Hotel video marketing includes videos about the wider hospitality industry, ranging from content about your hotel to exclusive leisure facilities and event promos. Hotel videos allow your audience to see exactly what your hotel has to offer and is a visually engaging and compelling way to promote and market your hotel’s products and services. This can all lead to better engagement on digital and social channels, a more informed audience, and a greater reach into your potential consumer demographic.
Video creation is a little more than just a pretty collage of images with a backing track and it’s not just about trying to sell content to consumers. If you truly want your content to be amplified, you’ll need to do more and use the strengths of storytelling in videos to send a real message. Emotions play a massive part so this is where you should focus your efforts. Try to instil awe in viewers with your videos to reach new guests, drive site traffic, and share your hotel’s story.
Video content offers a clearer idea of what messages and impressions your brand is trying to get across, promotes website visits and attracts bookings. Hospitality videos can allow you to truly connect to customers, which is a great way to win trust. In some cases, hotels can even improve customer service through their video marketing strategies by answering potential customer questions before they book.
Video marketing for hotels
Video marketing for your hotel can make a large impact. It goes further than just promoting your property with a video and can really help build a brand and boost exposure.
Travellers love to find inspiration through video-based content. Around 65% of people watch videos when planning a trip and choosing a destination, with a further 54% opt for videos when searching for accommodation.
Video marketing should be an integral part of any hotel’s marketing plan and is largely becoming the most important aspect of content marketing. When done well, hotel video marketing can be an effective way of promoting your hotel, building your brand awareness and driving bookings.
In this blog, we’ll discuss just how powerful video marketing can be for hotels, tips and some examples of hotels who are doing it right!
Table of contents
Why do hotels need a video marketing strategy?
For hotel marketers, video marketing should be a priority when creating strategies to attract bookings. A quick look at YouTube and the one billion people watching more than six billion hours of video each month will tell you how popular videos are.
Humans are notoriously emotional animals and the best way to engage them on this level is through video. Consider that people remember 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, but 80% of what they see.
Here’s some top statistics that should build any case for your hotels video marketing:
- 66% watched videos when thinking about taking a trip
- People are 10 times more likely to engage with and share video content
- 20% of users read text while 80% will watch a video with the same content
- At your property, guests are 67% more likely to book when a video tour is available
- 76% of social media users would share a video if it was entertaining
- Online videos will make up more than 82% of all internet traffic by the end of 2022
- 63% of travellers watched videos when looking for ideas for activities at a destination
- 71% of travel searches on YouTube are for destination names
Newer generations have a much shorter attention span, which is why Instagram Reels and TikTok videos have skyrocketed to popularity in recent years. The majority of consumers have stated that they would prefer to digest information about a brand with a video. Within social media marketing, video marketing is one of the most attractive forms of content for travellers, prompting more likes and shares, and has the power to drive more traffic to hotel websites.
Offering higher audience reach and insights, video marketing for hotels is one of the most effective strategies to implement.
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Learn moreBenefits of video marketing for hotels
Video marketing has a range of purposes. Not only is it useful for providing a quick insight into your accommodation and facilities but it can benefit your hotel in more ways than you realise.
Improve online search visibility
Businesses and hotels that add videos throughout their website and on blog posts are more likely to have increased visibility in search results, leading to more traffic to the site. Including video content in your social media marketing plan can provide further brand recognition and improved SEO (search engine optimisation) positioning in SERPs (search engine results pages).
Reach users further along in the conversion funnel
Consumers rely on video content at all stages of their journey to booking, with 48% of consumers watching videos when thinking about what type of trip they would like to take.
Build trust and brand awareness
Video content formats are a useful way to educate consumers about your product and service, with 94% saying video has helped increase their target audience’s understanding of the company. It also helps build brand awareness with 93% of marketers saying it has helped increase recognition with consumers. It is one of the best ways at raising brand awareness and allows an opportunity to directly engage with potential customers.
Influence group booking decisions
When potential customers or travellers can see what a hotel has to offer, it provides a better chance of persuading them to stay at your hotel.
Increase engagement within emails
A study has found that emails that include the word ‘video’ in the subject are more likely to be opened than emails that do not. Even better, the click-through rate for introductory emails that include a video increases by 96%.
Boost sales, conversions and revenue
Video content allows marketers to get a deeper analysis of reach, click through, number of views and drop off points. This means hotels are constantly able to analyse and adapt their social media strategy to ensure they are seeing growth. For example, scheduling social media video content can be an effective way to increase engagement rates and in turn lead conversions.
Recent studies have found that marketers who take advantage of video content on their site see revenue grow 49% faster. Additionally it has been seen that including a video on a landing page can increase conversions by over 80%.
Hotel video marketing ideas
From immersive virtual tours that transport viewers to your hotel’s premises to behind-the-scenes glimpses of your operations, meeting the team, and exploring the local area, video marketing offers a dynamic way to engage and inspire travellers. Here are a few powerful ideas to inform your efforts:
Virtual tours and 360 virtual reality
A popular and successful video marketing practice for hotels is creating virtual video tours of your property, with bookings 67% more likely to happen if a video tour is available. They allow potential guests to see your hotel in its entirety, without having to leave the comfort of where they are. This is a great way to increase long-term interest in the hotel, as it attracts guests who aren’t local but are keen to find out a bit more about the property.
Virtual tours are also beneficial for promoting event spaces, for example if your property was to hold a wedding, it allows prospects to get better acquainted with the space and your hotel overall, giving them a better idea of what they can expect.
Virtual tours differ depending on the business and property, so choose the best fit for your property and target audience. Think about creating tours for guest rooms, restaurants, amenities provided such as a spa, pool areas or specific recreational activities. Whatever puts your property at a unique advantage to the competition is worth showcasing.
Behind the scenes tours
Behind the scene videos provide a big opportunity to create content around the ins and outs of your hotel and functions. There are so many operations and teams within a hotel, so why not let consumers experience how you manage your property? Show off your restaurant and how the kitchen gets prepared for the dinner rush, or create videos around how your property helps set up and organise a large event. Highlight your employees’ capabilities and you could even include a video that provides an insight to the everyday day life of a specific hotel employee. Position these videos so that users feel they are getting special access viewing.
Meet the team
Similarly to behind the scenes video, meet-the-team content allowing visitors to directly see and get to know employees is a great way to add value. These videos not only are great promotions for your hotel, but are a nice way to highlight the on-hand team, their dedication, achievements and attention to detail.
If they have any tips, tricks or creative ways to handle situations, processes or events, you can also share that with your audience. If your property is an upscale hotel that prides itself on food and beverage services, do a spotlight video on this and share the chef’s or mixologist’s story.
Creating video content around your team allows guests to ‘meet’ employees and build a connection, and it also boosts your team’s self-esteem so they know they are valued.
Travel and local area video logs
As we now know, the majority of travellers research their next holiday through social media, videos and video search. Being a lead sector within the hospitality industry, hotels should be able to provide additional information about the local area surrounding a hotel.
Include ways they can easily travel around, top food spots and ways to get more involved with the local culture. Demonstrate how your hotel supports your local community, whether that is using regional produce in your restaurants or providing toiletries from small businesses. It’s these little touches that will make your video content unique and interesting.
A video is a great way to highlight your top tips to guests, and how your hotel can cater to any type of holiday and what they could be missing out on by not staying at one of your properties. If you have close relations to local business and partnership tourism services, be sure to promote this connection with a video that provides travel tips and perks guests can get by staying with you.
Testimonials and customer reviews
Another way you can aid your social media marketing efforts is to create video content on customer testimonials. For high-quality video content, you could organise interviews with customers who are willing to participate or clients who have used your hotel for business.
Alternatively, think about creating an animated view of written reviews from partner review sites or from customer review cards at the property itself. Try to highlight key points that benefit your property within these videos, such as the quality of the staff,the overall ambience of the hotel, and guests’ overall experience.
Including reviews and customer testimonials are a useful way to add human value into social media marketing and helps build trust between your guests and hotel. By choosing testimonials and reviews that represent your target audience, it can further motivate prospective travellers to find out more about your hotel and properties.
To ensure customers are more open to participate with interview testimonials, make sure you’re consistently engaging with them in person, on different social media platforms or by working with review websites. Encourage guests to leave feedback on your website or through other review services after their stay.
User generated content
Hotels can greatly benefit from user generated content – content created by the hotel’s current followers or customers – to help create new content and also reduce the amount of internal resource that goes into the process.
Many happy customers will naturally rave about their experience, however hotels should still encourage guests and followers to create content that can help organically promote the property. You should also be engaging with content that users are creating; like, share and comment on content to make followers feel recognised.
Tips and advice for hotel video marketing
Explore the art of successful hotel video marketing with these practical tips and insights.
From personalisation and audience targeting to mobile optimisation and emotional storytelling, these strategies will help your hotel create engaging video content that captivates viewers and drives bookings.
1. Personalisation
Be sure to add a more personal touch to your videos as this can be more valuable to your target audience. Don’t be shy to show your casual side and create content that customers can resonate with.
2. Keep it short
The majority of videos are viewed on mobile devices, so ensuring your videos are short and punchy is key. Specifically for informative content, 73% of consumers prefer to watch short videos when learning about products or services and videos of up to 2 minutes long get the most engagement.
This isn’t to say long-form video content won’t perform well either. For example, Marriott’s French Kiss short film enjoyed huge success. It all depends on what messaging you’re trying to get across to audiences.
No matter what, make sure to include an intro in your video content and keep it brief. It is an essential part of the video and should capture the attention of viewers as soon as they press play.
3. Know your audience
Depending on where you’re planning to share your videos can mean different audience targeting. In addition, some types of video content are better suited to specific platforms. Keep videos on social media platforms like Instagram or on your sites product pages short and sweet, but those posted on YouTube or even
Facebook can be long form content. To have a successful video marketing strategy, you should think carefully about who you’re targeting and where you should be focusing your efforts.
4. Think about the metrics you measure
While views may be the easiest and most obvious way to measure success, this method won’t give you an entirely accurate picture of your results. There are many other useful metrics you can look at to assess how effective your video has been in driving revenue or brand awareness.
These include:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Sign-ups
- Unique viewers
- Watch time
- View-through rate
- Sales
- Calls
That’s just to name a few. There’s also a range of ways to measure these indicators using Google Analytics, YouTube analytics, Facebook Insights, and Google AdWords.
5. Be realistic about your resources
Neither you nor your potential guests have much time to waste so it might be prudent to use shorter videos predominantly. Six second bumper ads on YouTube can often be more effective than longer form videos. Save your extended content for when you know viewers will be more receptive, such as evening Facebook posts.
6. Make it meaningful
Instead of celebrating your own brand, plan your content to revolve around moments that will be meaningful for guests.
There are numerous events and milestones throughout the year you can capitalise on to achieve this including Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Halloween.
You want to create interest, anticipation, and excitement in your target audience. You can do this by planting a seed with shorter content and give them more days or weeks later, revealing pieces of the campaign puzzle to keep them engaged.
7. Amplify your content
To attract more people, you should combine short and long content at the same time. You should also vary the platforms you use to host your content, and even use different content on each, depending on who you’re likely to connect with. This will help increase your incremental reach.
Once you have established a story or message in longer videos, make sure you create multiple shorter versions that are distinguishable from each other. You can then use them in a number of circumstances to reinforce what you introduced in the entirety of other videos.
8. Utilise industry influencers
Collaborating with industry influences, travel bloggers or those specific to the food and beverage sector can help promote your hotel and reach a larger audience.
There is a plethora of influencers who are willing and ready to market your hotel brand and its personality. This does usually come at a price, alternatively hotels can offer an incentive, such as a free stay and full experience at the property for an interview or an in-depth review. The more you build relationships, the more customers will associate these trusted and well known influences with your brand.
9. Include CTAs
Your video content should always include a call to action. It would be a wasted opportunity to not direct viewers onto your site or further down the path into a conversion. Highlight any discounts, promotions or seasonal offers; these may differ between types of video content and should be based on your target audience.
10. Include videos within your email marketing
Email marketing provides a direct line of communication between you and your customers, making it a great opportunity to include video content. Not only do videos make content stand out, but it is better well received with consumers than emails with standard text and photos. If your hotel has experienced any new renovations or updates to services, you can update your guests with this information through a video.
11. Add videos into content and social media campaigns
Videos are the top of the crop when it comes to content marketing and can be used in all areas of your social media marketing. It allows hotels to take content further and connect with audiences where they are the most active. Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter are helpful to market your property and services with over 3.5 billion active social media users, of which 64% have stated that viewing a video via social media has pushed them to a purchase.
You can use any video content created on all social media platforms; Facebook, LinkedIn YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, providing ample opportunities for hotels to reach larger audiences globally.
The number of videos people post to Facebook went up 75% in the past decade, while recent figures reveal that 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every single day. Storytelling also works well on Facebook, so try to take an audience on an engaging journey rather than selling your room.
Offering video in a similar format to Vine, Instagram videos can be 15 seconds long and you can also apply one of their many filters. Instagram has also made it easy to create easy time-lapse videos.
Snapchat
Snapchat stories are easy to digest and can be created instantly, lasting for 24 hours and ensure your brand is top of mind for followers.
The most important thing to remember when creating video content is that people want to be shown creative and emotive ideas.
12. Optimise videos for search and mobile
Mobiles are often the primary device in consumers’ everyday lives and are the first place you can aim to catch the audience’s attention. Not only is it important for user accessibility but also for online search. Ensure your videos are suitable to view on mobile devices or small screens and use schema markup when implementing videos onto your website so search engines can easily pick up video content to display.
13. Invoke emotion and tell a story
Emotions are an important factor in consumers’ decision making process and so should be equally as important for hotels to consider when creating video content.
Creating content to connect emotionally with audiences is key to the success of hotel marketing.
To influence emotional connections between viewers and your property, tell a story and make someone feel as if they are there with imagery, sound or effects. Once you have been successful at establishing an emotional association (hopefully positive), potential customers are more inclined to trust a company and therefore are more likely to purchase.
You can also establish emotional connections by ensuring you’re conveying your brand voice and personality through videos. Think about involving employees and let the audience see through the eyes of another human, through interviews or personal stories.
How to start a YouTube channel for hotels
Overwhelmed by the concept of creating a hotel youtube channel for your brand? Simply follow these steps below to get started.
Step 1: Define your goals
Begin your journey into creating a YouTube channel for your hotel by first establishing your objectives. What do you aim to achieve through this channel? Are you looking to showcase the unique features and offerings of your hotel?
Understanding your specific goals is crucial as it will shape not only the content you create but also the overall strategy you implement.
Step 2: Plan your content
With your goals in mind, it’s time to strategise the type of content you want to produce for your YouTube channel. Consider what resonates most with your target audience and develop a content calendar that outlines the topics, formats, and posting schedule.
For instance, a video of your chef crafting a delectable dish might captivate food enthusiasts, while showcasing activities in your property’s fitness centre or spa could attract fitness aficionados and relaxation seekers. Beyond your hotel’s premises, explore the local highlights, such as popular pubs, eateries, hiking trails, or nearby attractions. Share personal travel stories, not only from your guests but also from your staff, offering a glimpse into the experiences they cherish.
Step 3: Set Up Your Channel
Sign in to your YouTube account by clicking on the gear icon located at the top right-hand corner of the YouTube page. This will allow you to create a new business channel specifically for your hotel. Once the channel is established, fill out the profile and “about” sections with compelling content that showcases your hotel’s strengths and values.
Don’t forget to add those crucial links to your website and social media accounts. Utilise relevant keywords in your channel’s description to enhance its discoverability.
Optimising your YouTube channel further involves designing eye-catching channel art, the cover image that occupies prime real estate on your YouTube page. This is where you should make your brand the focal point, and if you already have a substantial library of videos then you can start to create short channel trailers that offer a compelling introduction to your property.
- Navigate to the “Channel” tab on the left-hand side of your YouTube dashboard.
- The “Status & Features” section allows you to check your account’s status and address any issues indicated in red.
- The “Featured Content” subsection allows you to select the featured video that automatically plays when someone visits your channel’s homepage. This video should be a concise and impactful introduction to your property.
In the “Branding” section under the “Channel” tab, you can choose the branding watermark that will overlay on your videos. This watermark typically features your property’s logo and includes a link back to your website, increasing brand visibility and engagement. It’s also essential to configure the keywords associated with your channel in the “Advanced” settings.
If you have a Google AdWords account, consider linking it to your YouTube channel for optimisation benefits.
Step 4: Produce engaging videos
The heart of your YouTube channel lies in the videos you create. While video production might seem daunting, it can be surprisingly straightforward. Before diving into video creation, carefully plan the sequence, content, and messaging of each video. Consider crafting a concise script that outlines the key points you want to convey.
Step 5: Monitor and respond to comments
Building an active and engaged YouTube community is a vital aspect of your channel’s success. After setting up your channel, optimising your page, and creating videos, you’ve taken significant steps, but there’s more to be done.
Now, it’s time to foster your YouTube community by actively interacting with your audience. Be attentive to their questions, comments, and reviews. Respond promptly and thoughtfully to create a sense of connection and engagement. Over time, these interactions can transform your viewers into loyal followers and advocates of your hotel brand.
Hotel video marketing examples
Here’s a few examples of video marketing done right.
Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts: ‘It’s in our nature’ story
This commercial is all about the punchline. Using stunning imagery and increasingly touching music, Shangri-La places the environment as backdrop to deliver a message on kindness and companionship, showing guests no matter where they come from, they will be accepted and safely harboured within the hotel.
Atlantis Dubai Hotel: 360 virtual video tour
Atlantis Dubai hotel provides a captivating complete 360 video tour of their property. It highlights the hotel in all its glory and captivates viewers with an immersive experience, guiding them through the main entrance, to room suites and several amenities areas in the hotel and around the local area. It shows guests what they can expect on their trip and within their accommodation.
Hyatt Regency Hong Kong: Travel tips
This video advert puts the viewer into the destination. Hyatt Regency has created something that feels as though you’re touring the area, with scenes guiding us through the train journey, incredible scenery and cultural attractions. It follows a couple and a family, showing that no matter what type of holiday a consumer may be looking for or who they’re travelling with, they can find it with the hotel.