In this article about travel & tourism videos, you will learn:
How video can improve your marketing
- Your customers will get to know your brand and products quickly & effectively
- Video can show off your brand personality to differentiate you from your competitors
- Video lets customers feel emotion and action through the eyes of others
- It helps potential customers “get it” for more complex activities or instructions
- Video is memorable, and consumers expect it from brands
- The numbers: video performance vs. single image
- Why just any video won’t improve your tourism marketing
Introduction
When was the last time you watched an online video to be entertained, understand a product with an explainer video, or plan your next travel destination? Like most consumers, it was probably recent since 61% of the world’s population watch between 4 to 10+ hours of online video every week.
Video is a prevalent medium in our consumers’ lives. Youtube, the capital of video content, is not just the second largest search engine behind Google; it helps 5 billion humans watch videos every single day.
In the travel industry, travel video content viewing is just as rampant. Online videos are viewed throughout the entire customer journey from awareness to purchase, mainly to make travel decisions. 63% of leisure and business travelers use travel videos of all forms when looking for activities to do in a particular destination.
Undoubtedly, video gives a fuller and richer view of how a tour experience happens, and it can address obstacles impeding a traveler to click the buy button.
Sure, every tour & activity operator is jumping on the video bandwagon, but that’s not the reason you should; use video to bring value to your brand. Here’s how:
How Video Can Improve Your Tourism Marketing
1. Your Customers Will Get to Know Your Brand and Products Quickly & Effectively
Video is a powerful medium to show who you are and what you do. Great-quality photos are essential; unfortunately, they only tell one part of the story.
For example, a prospective customer sees a photo of someone ziplining down the line, but this event is just a single moment of the story. The picture leaves questions in the traveler’s mind such as:
- How is the zipline cable attached?
- How did the launch go?
- How did the dismount work?
- What views will I see along the way?
- What did they think of the entire experience?
- Who are the people running this business?
Video can help prospective customers decide if your tour or activity is right for them.
2. Video Can Show Off Your Brand Personality to Differentiate You From Your Competitors
Video allows your brand personality to come through more strongly and quickly than pictures or copy. Your video can establish your tone and character to help a customer connect with you and see you differentiated from your competition.
Video combined with music can enhance your brand message and tone even more; it is the secret sauce to establish your voice, style, and behavior in a matter of minutes.
How your video is structured should also be relevant to your brand. For example:
- If your brand is fast-paced and action-oriented, create a video with quick cuts and movement.
- If your business is trying to convey the personality of a low-key and relaxing outdoor activity or a vacation rental service, use drifting drone shots to show the stillness and beauty of the surrounding landscapes.
- Do you want to show your outdoor jungle gym as a fun-for-the-whole-family adventure? Using animation in video with family shots can be a reliable attention-grabbing vehicle to drive consideration with your customers.
- Do you want to convey a brand that is playful and accessible?
The more your audience connects with your brand personality, the more likely they are to purchase.
3. Video Lets Customers Feel Emotion and Action Through the Eyes of Others
An in-experience video of your tour or activity is like reading a customer testimonial in 3-D.
Your prospective customers want to see themselves in an activity. Video is the next best option for someone doing it themselves by living vicariously through your past guest’s experience. Instantly, your tour or activity becomes more relatable and speeds up the process of consideration.
Video transfers emotion onto the viewer watching it.
Video has the power to transfer emotions onto the viewer. Changing body language and micro-facial expressions can only be communicated with more frames, not in a single photo. A man grinning on the platform of a zipline for the camera is not as powerful as the moment that captured the smile and exhilaration after he tried ziplining for the first time!
Video enables the viewer to feel that action.
Pictures can adequately show what you do, but photos can’t capture the moment-to-moment changes or movements to let your audience feel the action.
For example, the viewer can better feel the action when they see a participant in a riveting escape room ace his final clues, or what it’s like for a guest on a horse ride tour to wade through rivers, canyons, and breaking out into a galloping stride.
A picture of a zipline with a motion-blurred background can indicate speed, but it won’t show how fast it is. A video of the same zipline more accurately tells if a customer is slowly cruising or ripping through the air.
Videos can move a viewer to trust your brand.
Video can also trigger a viewer’s empathy – which is the foundation of good storytelling. When consumers can put a face behind your company, they will feel more at ease and start trusting your brand. No doubt, trust is a primary emotion that influences human beings to buy.
Motion has the power to better connect customers emotionally to your experience and helps them move to say, “Yes! – I want to book this!”
4. It Helps Potential Customers “Get It” For More Complex Activities or Instructions
Videos can make content accessible and digestible. For more complex activities that require a lot of explanation, video is ideal for delivering clarity quickly. This medium divides your messages into smaller chunks so it’s more digestible for a broad audience to understand what the activity or topic is all about.
For example, explaining or showing steps to ensure the safety precautions you take for your tour or activity can sometimes get lost in copy. Video can take that detailed information and make it seem easy, and dispel anxieties about your activity quickly.
QUIZ: What medium is more helpful in providing clarity for this activity in the shortest amount of time? A or B?
- A: Text and Image:
“An aerial trekking course incorporates 110 unique elements ranging from simple sky-bound strut to full-fledged daredevil achievement. It’s the ultimate jungle gym experience that’s an equally exhilarating challenge for both kids and adults!”
- B: Your Video
The faster a viewer can understand your tour and activity, the quicker they can decide if you are the suitable activity for them, which will move them to act – like booking or contacting you.
5. Video is Memorable, and Consumers Expect it From Brands
Video outperforms other mediums because it affects people biologically. Remember the last time you scrolled through your social media feed passively, but the motion from a video made you stop and take notice?
Humans are hardwired for motion, it triggers our internal fight or flight responses, so when something moves, it grasps our focus, and internally we perceive it as a potential threat – thus, we pay close attention to it. Video stands out and demands our attention for this reason.
You work hard to capture the attention of your audience and create a memorable brand. Interestingly, video is the most memorable content across every age group. Additionally, in this video study, viewers retain “95% of a message when they watch it in video, in comparison to 10% when reading it in a text.” Video works harder than other mediums because of its staying power.
Consumers expect video content from brands; in fact, 87% of consumers said they wanted to see more videos from brands just three years ago. Video gives the consumer the chance to see how your product “works” in real life, thus boosting consumer trust.
6. The Numbers: Video Performance vs. Single Image
Understanding video performance can best be measured by looking at Facebook advertising metrics because of the robust data we can analyze and make comparisons between video ads and image ads. Ad measurements include views, impressions, engagements, and click-through rate.
Videos deliver more views and impressions than other mediums.
Impressions are used to measure the performance of advertising campaigns. They measure the number of times your content (ads, video ads, etc.) were shown to your target audience regardless of whether they clicked on it or not. In this study, social media posts with videos received 48% more views.
More Impressions
In the tourism industry, we’ve seen a positive impact of video for our clients. We still use single-image ads to get quick messages and offers out to consumers. Ads with a single image work well for sales promotions or news ads when the weather is perfect for an upcoming weekend for outdoor go-kart racing.
One of our zipline clients found a 60% increase in impressions between all video content posted to social media than single image ads.
Higher engagement
Many users of social media use the platforms for the two-way interaction that it provides. People are looking to create and maintain connections. Likes, shares, and comments are ways your audience can interact with your brand; this is called engagement. Engagement is the best measure of how much your video resonated with your target audience.
Facebook also prioritizes posts with higher engagement. On average, video posts on Facebook get at least 59% more engagement than other post types. Additionally, in a study looking at the top 10 brand pages on Facebook, video posts generate 12 times the shares than text and images combined.
One of our clients in the tourism industry saw an average of 27 times more engagement on video ads (19% of the total impressions) compared to the single image average (0.7% of the total impressions).
Higher Click-Through Rates & ROI
Click-through rates (CTR) are the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. This metric tells you how relevant your video (or in this case, your video ad) is to the audience. If an ad had 1,000 impressions and one click, that is a CTR of 0.1%. The goal of an ad campaign like this is to get qualified users to come to your website and perform the desired action (ie. buy, fill out a contact form).
Our data shows an increased click-through rate (CTR) between video ads vs single-image ads, with the average single-image ad CTR at 1.0% while the average video ad CTR is 2.3% when comparing 4 of our tourism clients.
Caution: Creating Just Any Video Won’t Improve Your Tourism Marketing
Video consumption is changing, and just making videos doesn’t deliver results. With the immense amount of video content online, consumers’ attention spans vary, and they’ve dropped within the last year. For instance, an average Gen Z consumer’s attention span is 4 seconds less than a millennial consumers.
Videos must demand attention in the first 30 seconds with relevant and interesting content, or the viewer will move on. However, if your video captures attention quickly and then continues to entertain, offer valuable or interesting information, consumers will stay longer.
Conclusion
Video isn’t going away and will only rise in popularity. Digital video advertising spend in the US was estimated at $55.34 billion in 2021. It’s predicted that spending will continue to increase to $78.5 billion by 2023, which is double what it was in 2019 (Source: Statica).
Do you have video content that conveys your brand message, what you do, and how your activity works?
We’ve seen video strategies work for our clients and drive growth for their brands. If you want to learn more about how video marketing can work for your tour and activity brand, contact us to find out how.
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