The Importance Of Video In Tourism Marketing
It’s 2022, and we are at the peak of global travel and tourism. Though the pandemic and lockdowns have stalled the tourism industry and travel economy for two long years, the sector is looking forward to better days as the Covid-19 cases are noticed to be on a decline and as things are steadily improving.
A press release by WTCC said, “Latest research shows that as the world finally begins to recover from the pandemic, the travel and tourism sector’s contribution to the global economy could reach almost the levels before the pandemic by the end of 2022.”
As the interest in global travel is on the rise, we have also seen an influx of new social media trends and how especially “video content” has taken over the online media in the last few years.
Surveys state that 65 percent of leisure travelers do their homework online before deciding where to go or how to get there. Video content by brands and influencers seems to play an important role in the customers’ decision-making now and going forward.
As consumers book travel plans on a computer sitting thousands of miles away from their dream destination, video content bridges the gap in providing important information and helping customers make purchase decisions.
From creating awareness to purchasing, videos can be used at all the stages of the online sales cycle.
A few important areas where videos play an important role in online marketing are:
Attract: High-quality promo videos or short teaser videos help grab attention and attract online users to consider traveling or taking a vacation.
Travel videos are often known to trigger emotions of joy and excitement. This can be your first step to building a target audience base and nurturing them further down the marketing funnel.
Build trust: Authentic travel videos act as demos for retail products.
Consumers would like to know what they hope to get when they land at their destination. And videos help them visualize their travel and experience.
This also builds trust in the brand as they see and feel confident about what they will get.
According to studies, users who watched videos upped booking conversions by more than 150 percent.
Increase Efficiency: Videos can help reduce operational issues and increase ease of travel for the customers. Creating videos that provide quick hotel or destination tours, check-in and check-out process, and other formal activities can help reduce manual work and help increase smoother and more efficient operations.
Gain market share: With booming platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, the online audience consumes videos more than ever before.
Statistics state that:
- The human brain can process video 60,000 times faster than text.
- 55% of the online audience worldwide watch videos online every single day
- Over a third of all activity spent online is dedicated to watching a video.
There is no better time to utilize video marketing for your tourism business. Videos not only reach a large scale of the potential target audience but also can be shared across the platform by them. In addition, videos that are creative or led by influencers have a higher scope of being shared across the platform, increasing your reach.
Better SEO:
A study by MOZ SEO states, “Blog posts which include videos attract three times more inbound traffic than posts without video.”
Videos are highly favored for SEO purposes. They act as sources to drive traffic to your website from other social platforms and help with Keyword placements.
According to Forrester Research, videos are 53 times more likely than regular web pages to rank on the first page of Google organically.
With better SEO, your websites tend to receive higher and quality traffic than usual.
Some important factors to consider while developing video content for the travel and tourism industry are:
- Be authentic and real: consumers would like to watch, consume and consider genuine content, as tourism is an experience-based and expensive purchase. Hence, making informed decisions plays an important role for the customers.
- Create humanized videos: Travel and tourism are all about the experience. Involve people in your videos, influencers, and travel bloggers with good credit can boost the trust factor of your videos.
- Shoot and produce high-quality videos: Make sure your videos are of high quality and produced professionally, as they can help attain better attention and watch time. If you start with video production, you can always use an online video editor, making your video editing process smooth and easy. You can easily find hundreds of templates to produce and publish videos on social media platforms.
- Use Transcripts: transcripts and captions help reach a wider range of audiences across various geographies. Language barriers can be eliminated with transcripts and captions. Many online video editors have inbuilt options to generate transcripts for your videos easily.
- Duration of the videos: Various social media platforms have different ideal video durations that work better on these platforms. Identify the best video duration to grab attention and convey the message.
- User-generated videos: Encourage our customers to shoot video testimonials or experience videos, as they have a better trust factor and increase organic traffic.
- Get Creative: Make an effort to be innovative with your videos. Customers enjoy getting a behind-the-scenes look at a process showing behind-the-scenes action of your business and service, involve your staff and teams in your videos, and show how customers are served at your hotel or resort. Behind the scenes and creating short videos can drastically improve the purchase consideration of the audience.
A few important platforms to consider for video marketing are:
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Online travel magazines and aggregators
- Blogs and websites
Conclusion
With the insights mentioned above, we know that video content is here to stay and grow exponentially in the coming days. So it’s no better time than now to incorporate video content marketing for your tourism business.
Video content can often seem a daunting task to produce. However, there are many ways to produce videos with ease and effectively. First, use a good-quality phone camera and available resources to shoot creative videos in the initial phases. Then, you can use some efficient online video editing tools to edit your videos quickly and publish them on social media or relevant platforms.
