Hotel Video Marketing For The Holidays

The Holiday season is full of seasonal festivities that are great for powerful content marketing. One of the best forms of content to leverage during this season is video. Video content accounts for a great amount of traffic on the internet and will soon represent most of the content on the web. Video is a great tool for hoteliers to use if they want to attract more travelers to their property during the holidays. Before hoteliers execute a video marketing plan for the holiday season, they must come up with a strategy. Below are few tips to help hoteliers create an effective video marketing strategy for the holidays.

Forming a Strategy

Your video marketing strategy should be created a few months before the holiday season, so it’s ready to roll out by the time the holidays arrive. The first step to strategizing is to scope out the marketing landscape through research. See what holiday travel-related topics are trending. This can be done through hashtag searches, keyword searches, and searching Google for relevant topics. Next, hoteliers should plan the timing of their video release. Do you release before the holiday season begins to get a head start? Do you wait until after Thanksgiving to have a more focused video campaign? Which year-end holidays should you focus on in your video campaigns? All of these questions should be answered based on the research that was done and the hotelier’s understanding of the target audience.

Hoteliers should also look at their hotels for sufficient strategy data. Look at old data from the previous year’s marketing campaigns and see what worked and what was ineffective. What topics did travelers engage with most, and what fell flat? Use this information to help determine what should be incorporated into your video campaigns to create strong video content.

When creating videos for the holidays, remember to keep your content lighthearted and fun. Market your hotel, but avoid the hard sell. Consumers get enough of companies trying to push their products and services, so set your hotel apart from the rest by giving great content that affects emotions instead of trying to sell something. The ability to emotionally affect the audience works way better than boasting about why your hotel is the best choice for the holidays.

Types of Videos to Create

Once you’ve strategized and you know the approach you want to take, you must consider the types of video content you want to create. Use the research you’ve gathered on your target audience and other marketing campaigns to know what types of videos will be effective. Listed below are some types of videos that may work for the holidays:

• Videos showing holiday decorations at your hotel
• Videos announcing specials, deals, and contests
• Videos showcasing festive amenities
• Videos about holiday-related events at locations near the hotel
• Videos from previous years of people celebrating the holidays at your hotel

Posting the Video

Once you have your strategy down and your videos created, it’s time to post them. The best place to post your videos is YouTube. YouTube is the second most used search engine on the internet behind Google. With so much traffic going through YouTube, there’s no wonder that this is the most important platform for your hotel’s holiday video. YouTube videos also come with an embed code so you can post the video directly on your hotel’s site.

To get more views on your video and hopefully more traffic to your hotel’s website, SEO tactics must be implemented. As mentioned in the strategy section of this blog, search for holiday keywords that get a lot of engagement and use those in your video’s title and description. Place a link to your hotel’s website in the video description as well to give viewers direct access to your site. Using a strong SEO strategy on your video will make your video more likely to appear in searches.

Another way to get your hotel’s holiday video more views is to promote it on social media. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are places where audiences have the opportunity to communicate directly with your hotel. Posting a video on social media allows your followers the opportunity to share and retweet your video, which exposes it to their followers. This culture of sharing can introduce more consumers to your hotel, create more engagement on your social media site, and hopefully get more traffic to your hotel’s website.

Many travelers plan on taking trips for the holidays. Get these travelers into your hotel by creating a strong video marketing campaign. Come up with effective video strategies and plan the perfect time to implement them. Do your research to understand the best videos to create. Once you’ve created your video, please post it on the appropriate channels, and optimize it using the proper SEO methods. Remember to speak to the emotions of travelers instead of their wallets. With the right strategy and execution, you can get more bookings directly from your hotel’s website and keep your rooms full during the holidays. When you get the desired results, everyone at your hotel can be merry for the holidays.