Promote your Hotel with an Online Video Campaign

January 11, 2010

The internet is a wonderful and interactive medium that has many free tools that you can use to attract the attention of guests and drive them through your hotel doors. One such tool is ‘Online Videos’. An online video despite the implication does not necessarily have to be a movie clipping or a resized TV Ad; it can be a ‘how-to’ video that demonstrates how something works, a travel monologue or even a short documentary. This atypical form of advertising can be a very effective because of its popularity amongst online users. YouTube, the most popular video sharing website receives billion of views per day. By creating and uploading a video onto a video sharing website like YouTube, you can direct the attention of these millions towards your hotel.

An Online Video campaign is not a typical marketing and sales campaign wherein you create a hardcore sales video that emphasis the pros of your hotel i.e. it is not a video brochure. Typical advertising i.e. T.V. ads are termed as 'lean back' content because viewers consider them an interruption and have no choice whether they view the ads or not. Online Videos on the other hand are consider to be 'lean forward' content because online users search and choose to view. This difference increase the weight-age a viewers assigns the video.

An Online Video campaign is an extremely subtly form of marketing that leverages your hotel with the aid of another product or attraction. For example, if you have a hotel in Goa, you could consider creating short video clips of the best clubs, great restaurants, festivals etc. Any subject, activity or places that a person might research before selecting your destination i.e. you should create and upload videos that provide the viewer with some interesting, helpful and/or related information about attractions around your hotel.

The Key Benefits of an Online Video Campaign
An Online Video campaign can play a significant role in your internet marketing mix as it can help you:

• Increase your presence online
• Attract and engage the attention of global viewers
• Direct interested audience to your website (traffic)

Video Campaign Steps

• Research what kind of video content will interest potential guests. Before you start creating and uploading videos, you need to have an in-depth understanding of what motivates guests to select your destination and hotel over others. For example, tourist attractions such as the local zoo, the nightlife or the music festival or business amenities such as in-room WiFi. Knowledge of guest’s search patterns (keywords) will give you ideas on what types of online videos will help attract guests.
  
  
• Achieve maximum results with your online video campaign. Once you have discovered ‘what’ motivates guests to select your destination and hotel, you can begin creating short online videos to upload online. For effective results, create multiple short videos on related topics rather than just one long video, as they will help you engage the interest to different types of guests.
  
  
• Do not just create and upload videos, Seed them! Research what keywords online users use when researching potential business or leisure destinations. Use these keywords as your video’s main title, tag box and description. By using these keywords as titles or descriptions, you ensure that your video will appear on the first few search engine result pages if any of those keywords are used as the search criteria.
  
  
• Promote your video online. Attract the attention of more online users by uploading your video not only on video sharing websites but also on your hotel website and social networking account and community page.

Popular Video Sharing Sites    

You Tube	Metacafe
Break	Google Video
Dailymotion	Yahoo! Video
Revver	Vimeo
vidiLife	Stickam

To summarize, by launching an online video campaign, you add a generally free online marketing tool to your marketing mix that can help you increase your online presence and direct quality traffic to your hotel website.