You are in the process of drafting a video campaign plan to market your hotel/resort. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a template to show your manager/higher management how you plan on executing a successful video marketing campaign? Look no further. In this detailed guide, you shall get a comprehensive breakdown on how to execute a successful video marketing campaign for hotels and resorts.
Video marketing campaign for hotels and resorts
By the end of this article not only would you have all the necessary tools for your roadmap, but also be cognizant of communicating what all would be required for the success of the campaign along with the key KPIs for measuring success.
Step 1: Structuring The Video Marketing Campaign
Define Objective of Campaign
Awareness
Conversion
If awareness creation is the objective, strategy chosen must support this campaign goal. Spreading awareness about your property is all about making your target audience informed about your properties presence.
Based on this objective, you’d choose an appropriate distribution strategy along with a digital media spending plan.
Last but most importantly, selecting the KPIs on which campaign success would be measured needs to be set in stone before starting the campaign.
- A good example when a hotel/resort may need awareness is just after they have opened their property. The audience does not know about hotel open for guest intake. In such scenarios creating a video marketing campaign for spreading awareness is essential.
Conversion campaigns typically focus on tactics where marketing spend is utilized to result in increasing sales figure.
Although, it is not advisable to start your video strategy with a conversion heavy campaign if your property lacks awareness across your target audience.
Nonetheless, sometime, being the marketing manager of the hotel/resort first needs to show upper management the power of video communications before owners/higher management actually open up their wallet for a full blown awareness campaign.
This along with several other reasons might make the need for a conversion heavy video marketing campaign.
The key for a successful conversion campaign depends on
- To have a great conversion heavy video marketing campaign, make sure you have crafted a Compelling Promotional Offer
Define Audience Persona
Identifying your ideal customer profile is one of the most challenging exercises you may have to go through before moving further. It might be that a variety of audiences do come to your hotel, but when you are crafting the communication for the video marketing campaign, it is highly advisable that you choose a particular audience segment for which the communication is crafted.
Trying to attract all audience persona through a single video campaign will be extremely difficult. In fact 9 out of 10 times it won’t work out. So sit in a quiet room and figure out your ideal customer profile.
Depending on your customer profile the next decisions are to be taken.
Choose a Strategy to fulfil objective
Attract New Users
Property in New Destination
Newly Renovated Property
You want potential new guests to stay at your property. You would know your feeder markets. The destination in which your property is located is already famous. All you have to establish through your communication is that your property is situated in a prime location with exceptional amenities. Here, you may have to highlight why one should stay at your property rather than choosing the property next to you.
You have just opened up a new property in a not so well known destination. Or may be your destination is a little off-beat. This would require your communication to sell the destination along with marketing the hotel.
Since the destination itself is not widely known, marketing and creating awareness for the destination becomes extremely important to attract tourists.
You are an established property in your destination, but the property needed a renovation. This strategy focuses on the new and improved property amenities. This strategy can work very well with previous customers as they already know your property because they had stayed with you before.
Showcasing in the video all that has changed can help get more repeat customers. Likewise these improved amenities can also attract new guests.
The final video communications can be distributed among various audience category to get an increased footfall.
Choose Distribution Strategy
Primary Channel
Secondary Channel
Decide which channel would be utilized to maximize the outreach for the video content created. This would be predicated by audience analysis, i.e. channel is chosen depending where your audience is most engaged. If Facebook is where your potential audience is most active, do not worry about how many views YouTube channel is getting. Focus is the key over here.
The Primary Channel needs to be utilized to drive awareness and conversion, depending on what the goal of campaign.
This is the channel which your audience uses as a secondary source of information. For e.g. it can be YouTube where if someone goes and searches for property videos they should be able to find your video on YouTube. Alternatively it can also be on LinkedIn if your audience happens to be young corporate professionals.
The point to be remembered over here is that secondary channel may not give any tangible result. The reason for utilizing this channel being more vanity that result oriented.
Also, there may be edge cases in your audience segment who may see these secondary channels as their primary mode of media consumption. Those segment of the audience may benefit from consuming your video communications content through these secondary channels.
Media Plan and Ad Spending
How long would you want the campaign to run?
One can decide to run advertisements for campaign for any desired duration. Campaign can be advertised for 7 days or more than 365 days. All depends on what you are trying to achieve with your campaign.
What is the budget of the campaign?
As a thumb rule always keep the budget for distribution 3X the budget for creating the content. For e.g. if the video content production costs add up to 25,000 make sure you have around 75,000 for distributing the content
Give the content created a fair chance of reaching potential audience for whom the content is being produced. There are various tools provided by Meta (Facebook, Instagram) or Google to approximate the budget to audience reach ratio.
Defining Success Parameters
Awareness
Conversion
- Impressions
- Reach
- Average Length of Video Views
- Shares
- Engagement
*NOTE: Depending on the primary channel on which your video would get distributed, you would end up choosing your success KPI’s
- Website Traffic
- Phone Call Clicks
- Booking Engine Entrances
- Sales Generated using Promo Code
Now that you have created a structured plan for executing the video campaign it is time to select a partner who would shoot and edit the content. It is the most crucial part after the plan, since a plan is only successful depending on how well it is executed. Choosing the right partners can make or break the campaign.
Step 2: Producing content – Video Marketing Campaign for Hotel
Selecting Your Video Content Producer
Professional
Amateur
An established video producer has been producing video marketing campaign for hotels and resorts frequently. He would be able to show a portfolio of his/her past work based on which the work can be entrusted.
This can be a cost effective solution, but be mindful of how much should be the cost to benefit ratio involved over here. A newbie might be very enthusiastic on creating video marketing campaign for hotels and resorts, but they may not have the necessary experience to deliver what you envision. Keeping this in mind, you would need to detail out all pointers required so that he/she can deliver what is required
Initial Discussion, Story Boarding and Budget Estimation
Initial Discussion
Story Boarding
Budget Estimation
Clearly state the goal of the hotel marketing campaign to the producers you have chosen. Brainstorm ideas with content producers.
Exchange previous hotel video campaigns links which you may have liked and ask the same from the producers. Make a list of all the videos which are being used for inspiration purposes
The story that would be focused on communicating your message through the video marketing campaign must be clearly understood through the story board that gets created.
A story board essentially maps out how the story is going to unfold to a user keeping the central marketing message in mind.
This step requires time. So don’t hurry up on this process. Make multiple rounds of the story board before finalizing.
Any hotel marketing campaign design would benefit much more with greater distribution than producing a marginally better content at higher prices.
Remember to ratio – X:3X. If content is produced with X amount of money, 3X should be spent on distribution.
As a marketing manager for your property you may have a fair understanding how much budget may get passed for the campaign you are planning.
With the above considerations in mind arrive at a consensus with the content producers
Choose Shoot Dates
This can make or break how the video content comes out if not chosen carefully. While planning your video marketing campaign carefully choose dates which will let the video producing team shoot without scrambling for time. Talk to the reservations manager and figure out the dates where the hotel occupancy rate is low. Align those dates with the team producing the video. Also remember to provide dates on which the property is at least having some footfall, just incase you want to incorporate few shots showing guests in and around the property.
Editing and Review Process
Back Up Raw Footage
Segmentation
Review
One of the most important things one should do after the shooting process is complete – backup the raw footage and photographs in multiple places. Do not rely only on the video production team for this process. As a marketing manager you never know when in the future you may need few clips from this shoot.
Remember to have the full back-up of all footages and photographs with you in 2 different places. Just to be double sure.
While the video production team would do their own segmentation to create the final output, you can also segment the raw footages such that a folder would contain short clips which can be used as reels in the future. Look at the photographs taken during shoot to segment any such pictures which may be used to post later on Instagram/Facebook stories.
Once the first draft of the video output comes in look at it contextually. See the video from the perspective of a potential guest and review the output.
If the video would mostly be seen on a mobile device, make sure to get an output which would be a vertical video apart from rendering a horizontal output. Review the draft with upper management but take their feedback with a pinch of salt. Remember the upper management is not actively involved in the hotel marketing campaign end to end. So they may give feedback which may derail you from your final vision.
Although their feedback is important, remind them that they should measure success on the KPI’s which are pre-decided rather than on the output of the video.
Final Deliverables
While you were in the planning phase of the video marketing campaign for your hotel and resort you might have already figured out how many different outputs you would require to successfully close the final delivery list of items required. Create a folder in an online storage facility such that all output can be accessed from the cloud.
Apart from that have the backup of the final output videos be stored in 2 hard drives. The last thing you may want is final output lost because of mishandling or IT failure.
Now that you have the output files with you it is time to make the hotel marketing campaign LIVE on the digital platforms depending on your distribution strategy.
Step 3: Video Marketing Campaign – Strategies to Enhance Visibility
Utilizing Videos on Website for Enhanced Audience Recall
There is a high chance when you are running the hotel video marketing campaign, you would want potential guests to visit hotel’s website.
There are multiple ways in which a video can be embedded on your website for enhanced visibility. You can have the video on the homepage of your hotel/resort website. That way the moment one lands on the website, they would be able to see the video.
Alternatively you can embed the video on the specials page of your website such that when potential guests are in the consideration phase of their buying journey, they can go to the specials/promotions page to see the video before they can finally decide to book your property.
Utilizing Email Signatures across Team Members
If the content produced is good enough the whole hotel team should be proud of the campaign. Co-ordinate with team members and see if they can put up a link of the video URL on their email signature. Remember to tag the URL with a UTM code so you can understand how many visitors saw the video from email signatures.
UTM tagging can help in understanding which channel is working the best during the hotel video marketing campaign.
Politely getting Buy-In from Team Members to distribute content
If your hotel/resort team is happy with the video that is produced ask them if they would mind sharing the content on their social channels. Remember not all would want to share this on their social feed which is a very private space for many. So don’t force.
Only if they want to share, ask them to share it. If they don’t, let it be. You are running paid media campaign for distribution any way.
Amplifying with Digital PR
This is where your PR skills would be tested when looking at generating some earned media.
Get in touch with digital publications who may get value if they publish an article with your video embedded in it.
If your hotel was promoting an awareness campaign many digital publication houses may benefit by getting fresh content on their portals at the same time you get some much needed PR outreach and backlinks.
The earned PR coverage can further establish creditability on search engines for the hotel marketing campaign
Other Distribution Tactics
Social Media
Influencer Marketing
WhatsApp Marketing
Email Marketing
There is a high chance, more than 90% of your guests would be present on some social media platform or the other. Keeping this in mind making sure your video marketing campaign be put up on the different social platforms that your hotel/resort operates on.
The video marketing campaign can be further leveraged through an AD specifically for the followers of your Facebook/Instagram page.
Identify who are influencers who can help amplify the reach of your video campaign. It does not necessarily mean one has to be a vlogger/blogger to be an influencer. It might very well be the chef of your hotel who has a great influence on a single digital platform. Or maybe it is the front office manager who has a huge PR among industry professionals. Better still you may know a guest who has been a returning customer for a long time and wouldn’t mind sharing the video on his/her social feed.
Make it easy for hotel team mates to share the video on WhatsApp. Create a UTM tagged URL which is distributed across
WhatsApp all database contacts through the official phone number of the hotel. Put up small clips as status on WhatsApp on regular basis to drive users to your main video/videos. Everyday millions of users are using WhatsApp to check status and send messages. This is a great tool to leverage during the video marketing campaign phase.
Until and unless you are a brand new hotel/resort chances are you would have a huge email list to which you can draft personalized communication around the video that is created.
For e.g. if a guest came in last year and left a favorable feedback draft an email communication stating they would love to come back because you have upgraded the property facilities.
Creating personalized email communications with the hotel marketing campaign can be utilized to engage with guests who had previously submitted their email addresses either during a promotional campaign or when they had previously stayed at the property.
Measuring success/failure of the hotel video marketing campaign
Depending on the objective of your campaign create a datasheet that stores all KPIs in one view. You may have to work with your IT/Analytics team to figure out how one dashboard can be made for one view.
For e.g. if you were running an awareness campaign you may take help of Google Trends can show how a lot more people have started doing branded search with your properties name.
Alternatively, if you were running a conversion heavy campaign you would want to see the number of sales generated through the campaign. UTM parameters can help track such conversions.
When to launch a Hotel Marketing Campaign? Key Points of Consideration
Launching a successful hotel video marketing campaign involves several critical considerations. Below are key factors to keep in mind:
Understanding Your Peak Season
As a hotel marketing manager, you’re familiar with the peak season of your location. If the goal of your campaign is to boost awareness and attract more visitors during this busy period, it’s wise to start planning and launching your campaign well in advance.
Booking Window Length
It’s important to know how far in advance your guests typically book their stays. For example, if guests usually book between 50 to 90 days prior to their arrival, scheduling your marketing efforts to start 100 to 180 days before this booking period can lead to more effective results, regardless of the specific objectives of your campaign.
Responding to queries generated during video marketing campaign ongoing stage
- This is crucial during campaign ongoing phase. Social media/WhatsApp/Email or phone calls may come in from potential guests after they look at campaign video.
- Make sure you have informed your guest reservations and IT/Marketing team to respond to guest queries in a consistent tone and message.
- It would also be worthwhile to store all the queries which come in during this phase as it indicates users are not able to find the required information on property website/social portals. Utilize the short clips/photographs which were stored after the shoot was done and post on social media/website with the questions which were posed by the potential guests as updates.
Considering these factors will help you time your campaigns for maximum impact, ensuring that your hotel remains a preferred choice for travelers.
Final Thoughts
With all of the above in mind you are now equipped to create a successful hotel video marketing campaign. If you need a second opinion before executing your video marketing campaign, you can reach me out by filling in this form. The first consultation for an hour is FREE. I’d be more than happy to help you out with your first video campaign.
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