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Lets start with which i feel is till (after 3 years) one of the shortest and easiest to understand video about why you need staring to create video travel marketing content even though its actually a commercial.
Summarized: it's the fastest way to communicate available and people love videos.
Consumers love videos because its engaging and fast. Therefor they should be an essential part of your content marketing strategy, from inspiration, to planning, and on some platforms now even direct booking, because you are able to click on parts of a video.
If we look at underneath's already pretty old but very clear picture from Google Insight we see that travelers have a lot of different touch points before booking and several of them are video.
This means you need to have different videos targeted at you main clients to guide them towards a booking.
An excellent source for more example of purchase paths towards travel bookings download this PDF from Sojourn: Path to Purchases Examples
So you need different video's for different parts of the customer journey. I personally prefer to keep things simple and like to use 4 different type of videos
- Inspirational - Inspire travelers with your best experiences
- Helpful - Help Travelers with questions they have about your destination, product and company
- To Proof - Proof you are worth a try by letting other clients tell you did a great job
- To Sell - Promote an offer
Each video you make should be a story.
People are hardwired for stories, the evoke emotions and put us into action.
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Stories that have an element with Cute, Win, or Fail work extremely well. Cute things like small animals, babies, older people make us happy and we feel the need to protect it, and to protect bonds. While winning makes us feel proud, or proud of something to belong too, or faith in humankind. And failure triggers a feeling of empathy, you want to help.
The above comes all very cleverly together in this video of GoPro
The sounds in the video make the emotions stronger. Combining text, shots and sounds make that you can communicate a deeply layered message in a very short time.
The first videos we will make are inspirational videos, targeted at the early stages of the customer journey. Our goal is to inspire our persona's by showcasing your key clients while they are experiencing the best your travel organisation has to offer, these experiences are called hero experiences by marketeers. While showing your hero experiences you also want to weave in some of your Unique Selling Points to convince the traveler that your travel company is the right partner to deliver this experience.
Keep things simple, avoid trying to say everything at once, then its better to have different video's showing different unique selling points and experiences.
Your inspirational videos are meant to be seen most of all the videos you make, therefor you can allocate most of your budget to them. You want these videos to be really good.
The videos should be part of your advertising campaign, you can place the video on you homepage and distribute them through advertising on the social media's where your persona's are active.
Travel video example Tauck: This is your moment
Check underneath video that combined the elements we discussed: a story, clear persona's, unique selling points, best travel experiences they offer.
In 30 seconds Tauck shows they are a trusted and established luxury tour operator that has its own view on the world which they love to share with their clients and calling them to go for exclusive experiences and never settle for the ordinary. The short video close with a sense of urgency : now is the moment to travel ends with call to action to contact them
Note that they brand Tauck very early in the video: its important to show early on in the video who you are.
Example of using a story in a Travel Marketing Video : Be Intrepid
Intrepid bonds here (note the smart elements of cute shots in between) they connect their own value to the values of their clients and then claims how great those values are and that the world needs more of them.
The traveler has an opportunity to become the hero, all they need to do is book with Intrepid.
Length of your Travel Marketing video
You want a good mix between longer explanation videos and shorter teasers or inspirational videos for on your website, social medias.
Nowadays short videos do very well in reels of Instagram, Shorts in Youtube and of course TikTok.
Photo's used by:
Priscilla Du Preez and Phil Coffman
