Are your travel destination videos up to scratch?
There’s no doubt that video has become an important medium for communication in all facets of life, from entertainment, to the way businesses use video conferencing. Within a mere 30 seconds, video has the power to cut through clutter, capture the attention of an audience and create an impression.
The travel industry is no exception. With online-only travel bookings steadily increasing in Australia to 16 per cent over the past year, research suggests that consumers are increasingly using videos to determine their next holiday destination.
It should be no surprise that videos garner greater engagement, and lead to greater involvement from consumers. Brightcove usage statistics show online conversion rates increase from 2.9 per cent for those websites without video, to 4.8 per cent for those with.
While at a glance those figures may seem small, the difference is clear. It means, simply, that websites without video need to generate 137,000 unique visitors for every 100,000 visitors a website with video does, for the same amount of sales leads.
Tourism Australia recently found video a huge motivator in its bid to increase tourism spending here to $140 billion annually by 2020. Just one video on their website was viewed 9.6 million times, with iPad users alone counting for 1.3 million of those views.
Those who viewed the video had the highest engagement with the Tourism Australia website, spending eight minutes or more online; an eternity in the online world.
But it does not mean that any video will work. Placing a 30-second, poorly made clip of a faraway place is not convincing enough to make a consumer decide their next holiday destination or the booking method.
Instead, videos must themselves be compelling — they must sell the location they are portraying, and tell holidayers not that they CAN go to that destination, but that they MUST experience the destination for themselves. They must transport the viewer to a place they have not yet discovered.
Those travel videos which have truly been successful — those that have gone viral, and been shared thousands of times on social networks — are not a mish-mash of shots of a far–away location. They transport the viewer to a location they may not even have considered travelling to.
Survey results suggest that, if the quality of the video itself is good enough, a third of viewers are likely to research the product further. Comscore research reveals that professional videos outperform user-generated content by 30 per cent.
This is true, too, of travel — engage the viewer, and you are more likely to be successful in convincing them that a lesser–known hiking trail in Papua New Guinea is better than the millionth trip to the Macchu Picchu.
Videos provide the one thing most other marketing mediums cannot — they can evoke emotion, build anticipation and instill a level of comfort and confidence in the buyer’s purchasing decision.
It is clear that flashy brochures are no longer enough to convince consumers. Those looking to stand out from the crowd and provide a truly compelling experience for potential travellers (and customers), should look to videos as a core part of their travel and tourism websites — they are necessary to ensure visitors are engaged, and excited for that next holiday.
Mark Blair is Vice President of Australia and New Zealand for Brightcove.
Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au
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