Recent findings on video marketing is driving hotels, resorts, and all kinds of businesses to adopt videos as a major marketing tool for their campaigns. It is no exaggeration to say any hotel or resort that doesn’t advertise through video is missing out on the substantial revenue boost of video content and will likely suffer setbacks in the long term.
But with some 16% of marketers clueless about where to start video marketing, we want to help you get started on your hotel video marketing campaign. To that end, this is one of a series of articles on hotel marketing strategies to help owners and marketing managers do it right.
We'll dedicate a section of this article to showing you how to derive lessons from good and bad hotel videos. This will sharpen your creativity in choosing hotel features to shoot whenever you need a promo video. Then throughout the rest of the article, we'll watch different videos and pick some vital lessons from them. Watch the short video below to better grasp how important video marketing for hotels is.
But you'll need to know where you should take inspiration for your hotel video. Look out for those that hook you, intrigue and give off some kind of mood or emotion. Videos that look and feel great are the ones to try and analyze for ideas.
There's no end to the number of videos you can learn from. So, we won't include everything here. We'll just focus on learning how to analyze videos to help shape your campaigns. Then dissect enough examples to give you something to start with before studying others on your own.
Every business would have a selling proposition, barring a total absence of competitors. Your selling proposition is the unique offer that will make consumers choose you over competitors. If possible, you alone should have that unique offer or only a handful of businesses in your industry. The hotel and resort trade is no different.
You ought to try and get this unique offer across in every marketing campaign. If you study the hotel and resort marketing videos that you like closely, you will notice something unique about most videos that all others don’t have. While this might not be their main and only unique offer, it’s likely to be among. So, when studying hotel videos, try to understand their unique offers. Observe the hotel’s features that are used to communicate such offers.
If you have been in the hotel and resort business for a while, it’s hard to think your hotel or resort doesn’t have a unique selling proposition unless you don’t bother targeting customers online. If your offer effectively attracts customers from competitors, just focus on identifying or discovering the combination of hotel features that’ll best communicate that offer. That’s how hotel marketing with videos is done.
You may discover hotels online with a similar value proposition as yours, which may not be in your area. Watch their promo videos, and pay attention to how each hotel tries to present its offer. Note the ones you think are most successful at communicating their messages.
You'll probably need different types of videos because hotel video marketing tactics differ, and you ought to use what you find necessary. For example, a website video would be quite different from a testimonial or an ad video. However, all video types should manage to communicate your best value propositions.
Hotels and resorts typically produce marketing videos to use for/on:
The length and approach of your video will depend on its purpose and content. For example, you would shoot a short video for TikTok and lengthy room tours for certain website pages. That’s how to promote a hotel business via a wide range of videos.
Let’s pick 4 from these major reasons for hotel videos and provide good examples of each to distinguish them. Most examples can be adapted to any purpose.
We have come up with a wide range of ideas for hotel video production. So, let’s look at the kind of videos to shoot for the following purposes:
Potential customers would love to see videos about the above-listed activities upon discovering your hotel or resort online. You need to try and not disappoint guests in order for them not to reciprocate it. So, let’s see what ideas there are for hotel website videos.
Most people visit your site from smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops of different screen sizes. Consequently, any promo videos hosted on your website must be suitable for these devices and screen sizes. Your hotel videos, designed to make first contact with viewers, should fulfill the immediate goal of grabbing their attention and persuading them to view more. That's the main job of homepage videos and others on your high-ranking pages.
So, you want to showcase as much as possible in less than 2 minutes. If viewers like your brief advert, they are more likely to watch others with a relaxed mind. Let’s study some features of good videos for a hotel website.
A hotel website video is also called a banner video, and it should be within 30 - 90 seconds long, though some good ones can reach nearly 3 minutes long. However, longer videos have low watch-through rates. People aren't on your website to watch a movie about your hotel. What they want is easy-to-digest info asap. So make it brief and info-rich.
Whenever potential guests watch your promo video, they want it to load fast. You'd find many videos online that obviously aren't long but load slowly. Sometimes this is caused by the platform to which the video is uploaded, but the video's features can also cause it.
You want to capture the best of all critical amenities of your hotel, especially since the video displays on your homepage. The first video that guests would love to see about your hotel or resort is that which shows their desired amenities at your facility. They won't seek the granite details of each amenity, but they'd want to see enough to be able to get an idea and decide.
Peeking at different hotel videos online will reveal some attractive features about certain hotels that might give you an idea of what to film in your own hotel.
Every luxury hotel or resort would claim to be calm and comforting. But when compared to others, some hotels are less comforting, less calm, or even chaotic. If your hotel is a luxury establishment isolated from the city and has a calm atmosphere within and around it, then focusing on advertising these values in some of your videos will likely pay off. See examples of such videos below:
The video opens with an aerial view of the hotel and its surrounding areas. As it progresses, you get the impression of how living at the hotel feels like. Apart from the interior luxury and caring staff, there’s lots of places worth sightseeing. One unique thing about this video is how it communicates the seclusion of this resort. By capturing plenty of the environs far beyond the resort, this video adds an element of seclusion, privacy, and an escape from the hubbub of city life. It’ll appeal to guests looking for an isolated and luxurious resort.
This one also focuses on what your experience would be like living at the hotel - without featuring external attraction centers. However, the video captures a great deal of the internal luxury of the hotel, the friendly tradition of the staff, food, and comfort zones. So, our impression of Lloyd's Inn is that of luxury, calm, and total satisfaction.
You can focus on your hotel’s tradition when shooting advert videos, just like the Aman Summer Palace does perfectly with the video below. Watch the video and read our analysis of it to better understand the lessons therein.
This video begins by showing the frontage of the Aman Summer Hotel in Beijing, China. The background sound is simple and low, and the video focuses on the traditional aspect of the hotel, such as its Chinese architecture and furniture, instead of its amenities. This makes for a great hotel marketing strategy that only focuses on a handful of aspects.
While many stationaries are modern, several aspects of the hotel depict old-school Chinese lodging practices, such as the kettle & teacups and the rickshaw driver picking up a departing guest.
What is understandable from this video is the hotel trying to appeal to customers’ curiosity or desire to experience traditional Chinese lodging. Of course, such a video is aimed at both Chinese and foreign guests since most hotels in Chinese cities use modern designs and equipment. It showcases two things for the guest:
If your hotel is designed to mimic some ancient lodging culture, then that culture is naturally one of your strongest selling points. You can capture shots that display the cultural setting and experience of your hotel or resort. To have built such a hotel implies that your hospitality market research confirmed the availability of customers and hotel culture videos are among the best hotel promotion ideas to reach potential guests.
The traditional hotel video marketing shoots still work, but not like before. Traditional shoots typically open with a hotel staff guiding you from the entrance through the reception, hallway, rooms, and all other amenities. It’s one of the top hotel marketing ideas despite being around for a long time.
However, the playbook is getting old-fashioned amidst a plethora of creative approaches ushering in much-needed change in guests viewing experiences. In the second video, the hotel shows some behind-the-scenes activity. You can use either of these approaches for your hotel video.
A mythical story like that of the example below might actually exist, and perhaps you'll learn more about it upon reaching the hotel. This story evokes emotions and may remind some viewers of their heartbreaks. It's presented in a fashion that implies the princess journeyed into a cloud forest to heal from her emotional pain. That begs the question of whether it targets heartbroken guests.
So, if there’s some interesting history or myth about the vicinity of your hotel in Singapore, see whether you can weave it into the video or even base your advertising video entirely on the story and position your hotel as a continuation of that story, like Inkaterra Hotels successfully did.
FOUR SEASON’S hotel video demonstrates the hotel's culture of pleasant surprises and exceptional hospitality. How does your hotel treat guests? Do you have any unique surprises or experiences for them? You can use these to craft viral hotel promo videos for your website.
The hotel video below blends culture with luxury in a manner almost certain to appeal to foreigners.
You’d find many online hotel videos that attempt to inform viewers of their location's historical significance - something likely to be unique to that hotel or resort. Is there anything about your hotel or resort that no other or few have? That unique feature must offer some wonderful experience or evoke powerful emotions; otherwise, it will have no marketing value. If there is, it could be among your strong selling points.
This video leverages the uniqueness of the hotel's environment as opposed to showcasing its amenities. It's the kind of video that works for all marketing channels: social media, websites, blogs, paid ads, etc.
Here’s another video that leverages the hotel’s environment and culture. It’s a good example of how to promote a hotel business online via its culture and surroundings.
Certain videos try to convince you within seconds by presenting the hotel from a guest’s viewpoint. Sometimes the guest would stand looking around the hotel, their faces showing pleasant surprise at what they see, even if the video viewer doesn't see them. This could be a great marketing tactic for a hotel or resort in Singapore that hasn't any unique qualities that no other has. For example, the hotel in this video has a heated pool.
No matter how you design a swimming pool, it's unlikely to be 100% unique because other hotels may have a similar or even better swimming pool. They can copy your design, improve on it, or even outstrip you completely with a different one. This is why it’s hard to stand out on amenities or qualities that any resort or hotel can have.
Room tours shouldn't be the first video visitors see on your website because visitors want to see more than just your rooms before deciding whether or not to seek more detailed videos. They want to know what the experience will be like. It's not as if you shouldn't have room tour videos on your homepage, but they shouldn’t be the main focus in your video.
The moment visitors land on your website, they'll start watching any available videos after reading a few texts. And they are highly likely to start with videos they see first. You can have a separate webpage dedicated to advertising your rooms.
But room tours are great to compliment images and text on the page displaying the different rooms you have. So guests have a better idea on the room they’ll likely be staying in.
There are endless ways to advertise hotel rooms in videos. The approaches are similar to website hotel videos, but these can display much more detail. Some examples here demonstrate how to showcase your hotel rooms online using videos.
You don't know which features of your hotel room would tilt a viewer's decision in your favor against competitors. Features as simple as overhead lights or a table's mirror element might be the last deciding factors to earn you a booking after the guest might have viewed a dozen other hotel promo videos.
When making a room tour hotel video, you can start from the hallway or any part of the room that you consider the most attractive. Starting with a room's best features increases the chances of hooking the viewer. Introduce room amenities according to their importance - which means a chronological arrangement from best to good. See the examples below:
You may choose to shoot videos of certain areas in your hotel to emphasize the depth of experience using them. It’s a good example of how to market hotels with videos.
Your room tour videos can be long, but try not to exceed 5 minutes unless you have interesting and unique things to show. Shooting a long room tour will work if your hotel rooms pack many wonderful amenities. But if you have just a few facilities that a 1-minute video can detailly cover, extending the length will only decrease viewer retention and trigger viewer drop-offs. See a good example of a long hotel room video below:
Short room tour videos are typically less than 2 minutes long and don't attempt to present the nit gritty of your room’s amenities. But it captures enough to demonstrate the experience of living in the room. It can focus on the most important amenities or cover an entire picture of the room and its immediate environs. Here’s one example:
This presentation style better fits large hotels or resorts with enough staff and amenities. A video like this is better suited to a homepage or landing page. Because it gives plenty of details about the hotel which Ad videos cannot due its nature of being short.
This is an example of how to market hotels via a more traditional approach. The video shows the staff, amenities, surrounding scenery, and what experience to expect.
Do you have any special stationaries in your hotel that you are proud of? Such things need to feature in your promos because not many hotels may have them, and they raise your hotel's status in the eyes of your customers.
Some hotels have such a diverse collection of smart tech amenities that they can make a promotional video entirely on the smartness of their hospitality. Things like temperature-regulated mattresses, ultra-comfortable beds, dim-out blinds, etc., should be covered in your videos since many customers might not even know they exist.
Is there anything special about the mixologists of your bar? Many luxury hotels create wonderful videos about their staff meticulously creating cocktails. Another feature that might attract attention and excite viewers is the odd location of certain facilities, such as a bar on the roof.
How can a potential customer believe that what's been said in such videos isn't biased? Testimonial videos are for customers to talk, not for the hotel staff to line up and keep praising your hotel's features and services. It's like a video version of reviews where people can just watch and not need to read through.
Here's an example of a powerful testimonial video made for a co-working space . You can see that it features several customers talking about their positive experiences with Found8. We can help you to market your hotel or resort online by shooting these testimonial videos.
Testimonial videos are powerful to visitors who come to your website or watch your hotel videos on social media and other platforms. No other video about your hotel can convince customers, like testimonials. This is the same for every single industry out there, not just hotels and resorts in Asia. 95% of customers check online reviews before paying for a product or service, and video reviews are more credible than their textual counterparts.
This is a powerful hotel testimonial video. It begins with an actual customer talking, which convinces viewers that it’s genuine. The hotel took it to the next level by displaying its mansions and amenities as the reviewing customer talks in the background. Splendid.
This marketing masterpiece features several customers heaping praises on the hotel’s services. They don’t show off the hotel’s amenities as the first video does, but the advert is still good.
To wrap up on testimonials, get your customers to talk positively about your hotel’s features that help communicate your unique offer.
You can find thousands of hotel video marketing ideas out there, any of which can inspire you. If you hadn’t bothered to invest in video marketing before, it’s better to take it more seriously now because the industry is rapidly employing it plus the millions of views and reviews of customers show its popularity among guests. We’ve seen that hotel videos differ based on which amenity is being covered and how. Thankfully, examples abound on any type of video you want to shoot. You can even figure out what works and what doesn’t by analyzing the engagement about videos.
It’s clear from the article that the one central factor common in all great hotel marketing videos is the selling proposition. Without preparing an attractive and preferably unique offer for clients, it would be hard to produce a highly impactful video. Create your unique offer while taking into account that of your competitors (within the same town or city). You don’t want close similarities between your unique selling proposition and a competitor’s, especially if yours seem inferior.