How to use Videos to market your Travel Business

Introduction

As a travel or hospitality business, you may have an online presence but now it is even more important to reinvent yourself and improve your customer’s experience through innovation and latest technologies. Understanding the latest digital dynamics and consumer behavior is the key to growth that can transform and scale your business dramatically.

A lot of travel businesses today are using content marketing for better productivity and a high ROI. It has aptly been said that content is king and content marketing is an extremely effective way to sell your travel products.

Over the past few years video marketing has become a powerful content marketing tool to sell travel specific products, be it destination packages for travel agents/tour operators or rooms and ancillary services for hotels. The reason is that people tend to remember videos more than text and that videos leave a powerful impact on the minds of the customers. According to Forbes, in 2019, it is estimated that 80 percent of all Internet traffic will be to videos.

Over the years, YouTube has emerged as the most popular video sharing platform on the internet and the user base on it is expanding exponentially everyday. Some amazing facts relating to YouTube are mentioned below.

• More than 1 billion people use YouTube
• Average YouTube mobile video views per day are 1 billion
• 81% percent of U.S. Millenials use YouTube

(Source: www.expandedramblings.com)

• • According to reelseo.com 71% of the companies plan to increase their video marketing budget, because they feel, it works.

• Also, according to reelseo.com 73% of B2B marketers say video positively impacts marketing ROI.

Recent Trends in Video Marketing

• • Marketers today are using Vine which is a short-form video sharing service where users can share six-second-long looping video clips to create brand awareness and increase customer base.

• • More and more businesses that have an online presence will have video content on the Home Page of their brand’s website. They use video to demonstrate how their product/service works and how it benefits the end users.

• Meerkat and Periscope are two live streaming apps that are being used by businesses and is looked upon as a promising video marketing tactic that will help create brand awareness and is supposed to explode in 2016.

How a Travel Business can use Video Marketing to Drive more Sales

Nowadays travelers are looking for a visual experience before traveling to a destination which helps them in making decisions easily. Let’s say you are a travel agent and want to sell your travel packages of Thailand and have a video which demonstrates sightseeing activities like the opulent Grand Palace museum, the ancient Buddhist architectures, the lovely Railay beach, the Chiang Mai zoo famous for its giant panda in your Thailand package, chances would be very high that your potential customer would love to visit the place and book for your travel package.

Millennials being the major category of travelers are also the major users of YouTube, according to the aforementioned statistics can be your target audience.

So as a travel agent it is high time that you jump on to the video marketing bandwagon as it will certainly help your business grow by leaps and bounds given the visual impact it leaves on the minds of your customers.

If you are a hotel, a video depicting your hotel premises and rooms will help your potential customers get a visual experience of the kind of accommodation they would be using.

Also the hotel can show facilities it provides, like gym, spa, swimming pool etc in the form of  brief videos to their customers when they are on the hotel’s site. This will go a long way in increasing direct bookings for the hotel.

You do not need to limit yourself only to the rooms and ancillary services that you provide but you can also create an emotional connect by putting up videos of the founders talking about the legacy and heritage of the hotel. Such videos create a trust in the minds of the customers regarding the experience they will get, if they book the hotel.

You can also show short video testimonials of real customers to strengthen your brand’s credibility.

Benefits of video marketing for travel businesses

• Videos tend to be very helpful in building a brand name. So if you are a small or a mid sized travel agency or a hotel, you can show a video depicting the history of your hotel and any interesting facts about it along with what your hotel’s brand stands for, which will help you increase brand awareness and recognition.
• When your customers watch a video of the destination they are interested in visiting, it enhances the chances of the customer booking that trip with you. Or if you are a hotel, and have videos showing the types of rooms and services you are providing, it builds a trust in the minds of the customers about the services they will receive on reaching their destination and consequently in both the cases the look-to-book ratio tends to increase. This helps in generating leads for your business.
• An impactful video on your website is a great way to improve online engagement of leads or potential customers.
• It is great for SEO. According to Google’s search algorithm Hummingbird, it gives priority to quality content rather than keyword specific content and videos, especially those uploaded onto YouTube, can have a significant impact on search rankings.

• YouTube has a huge user base so the chances of higher shares, likes, comments and the video going viral are high, provided you produce quality content for your target audience.
• According to vidyard.com, audiences are 10 times more likely to engage, embed, share and comment on video content than blogs or related social posts.
• You can use video analytics to study customer behaviour and work on improving your performance. Understanding customer behavior and how it is evolving is very important.

Thus, we can say that video marketing is an effective strategy that has the potential to help you grow your travel business’ productivity and efficiency. As businesses learn more about the power of videos to generate more traffic and sales through them the popularity of video marketing will continue to be on a climb.