Four Steps to Win Video Content: Tourism Edition

October 8, 2015

Four Steps to Win Video Content: Tourism Edition

To Travel: Travel:make a journey, typically of some length or abroad.“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

Our definitions are as different as the locations, but we all travel. The reasons we travel often appear surface. Make no mistake, there’s an innate desire to explore and discover. Understanding why can feel like an easy exercise in target for all thesocial media marketing and branding folks out there. For example, if you’re thinking about the Disney World audience, targeting families might be a good idea. Creating memories? Sure. Escaping the drudgery of day-to-day? Maybe.

Step 1: Understand the Traveler:

As marketing and branding experts, we’re led to believe travel is about experiences … which is not an easy message to convey in a 30 second television ad. Fortunately, the rise of user generated content gives brand managers, marketing directors and anyone with a vested interest in travel and tourism marketing a not-so-secret weapon. The travelers themselves!

A recent study by Chase Media found that nearly all (97 percent) of millennialsshare their travel experiences on social media. Great. That means you can watch videos and look at pictures of other people having a great time online, right? Well, yes. But there’s a lot more to the story.

Much of this material stays trapped in an iPhone or Android device and never sees the light of day. Unless you’re working for the NSA, most departments, agencies and locations with a vested interest in understanding how tourists and visitors experience their destination location remains a mystery.

Step 2: Monitor Social Engagement and User Generated Content:

HootsuiteHootsuite allows marketers in the tourism world to keep up with hashtags, mentions and user engagement across most social platforms through a single dashboard. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the blog section of your website can all be connected to your Hootsuite dashboard.

BufferSimilar to Hootsuite, buffer allows users to create custom dashboards. Some might argue the analytics and reporting is beefier in Buffer, so if you’re a data guru, Buffer would be the way to go. There are actually individuals that use both Hootsuite and Buffer to manage campaigns using the unique features both offer.

Search.Twitter.comSimilar to both buffer and Hootsuite but specific to Twitter, search.twitter.com allows you to easily search hashtags and most importantly, competitor keywords within your hashtag. It’s easy to spend a couple hours on search.twitter.com without a lot of takeaways so be sure to decide what you’re wanting to learn before visiting the site.

Step 3: Empower the Traveler

According to Google Insights, 83 percent of people reference image sharing websites and video sharing websites before making a travel decision. According to that handsome man on Trivago commercials, the average travel customer searches seven websites before booking a flight, and that’s after they’ve decided where they want to go!

Clearly the behavior a consumer takes when making traveling decisions has changed. And continues to evolve.

The quality of the iPhone video camera is a astonishing. The videos below were shot on an iPhone 6. The same device used to take selfies, add emojis and play songs from the Lion King (you know … the deep tracks hidden in your library) can shoot video in the following specs.

a. 1080p HD video recording (30 fps or 60 fps)

b. Slo-mo video (120 fps or 240 fps)

c. Time-lapse video with stabilization

d. Cinematic video stabilization

e. Continuous autofocus video

f. Take still photos while recording video

The following videos were shot on the iPhone 6. This, as a reminder, is a video camera that fits in travelers’ pocket!

https://youtu.be/5iVXyPHDPB4

https://youtu.be/6DOmgey5-4w

 

Wield this power to your advantage by empowering these travelers to create cool videos. Launch a competition to see who can capture the essence of hunting in theIdaho wilderness. Start a video competition with the goal of capturing the fun things happening in and around the public green space of San Francisco. Rather than sit back and monitor hashtags, control your own destiny by exciting the creatives visiting your target destination.

Step 4: Repurpose Content:

Video content produced by a contest run through The Audience Awards is referred to as evergreen. The evergreen tree is synonymous with perpetual life. Post the videos on your website. Provide embed codes for bloggers and other websites to link to them. Here are a couple user-generated videos for a the Real Montana contest run through the Audience Awards:

Try not to celebrate publishing. When you have a great video submission, it’s not quite time to celebrate. Celebrate when the submission reaches 1,000 views. 10,000 views or 100,000 views. Work hard to get the video in front of prospective travelers to your area. Sitting on great content is like driving a Ferrari below the speed limit.

If you have any questions about user generated content or how to go about setting up a video-content, feel free to contact us here at the Audience Awards.

Paige Williams

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