Videos are an undeniably powerful marketing tool, especially for the hotel and travel industry. After all, they have the ability to capture the attention of the audience much quicker than text and have the power to generate extremely high traffic to your website. No wonder video marketing has taken the Internet by storm. This effective tool is so versatile that you can use it for promoting your hotel’s services and building customer rapport.

What is Video Marketing?

Video marketing isn’t just about selling content to a target audience. There are different aspects of this online marketing tool that can be used to promote website visits, products and services as well as to attract bookings. You can even improve your customer service through effective video marketing strategies.

How Your Hotel Can Benefit From Video Marketing

A professionally created hotel video will help your business gain credibility in the marketplace. Video content won’t just help you tell your story, but it also allows your potential customers to get a feel for your hotel’s facilities and services before they book a room on your website. In this article, get to know the 5 essential video marketing tips and some amazing video examples to increase your hotel revenue.

1. Focus on quality

High-quality videos tend to attract more viewers than low-quality images. The fact is if your hotel video looks like it has been created by an amateur, the chances of room bookings will be much less. By creating a high-quality video, you will get the best possible returns on your investment. If your video doesn’t quickly or effectively address the needs of the guests through quality pictures, they will simply move on to another property and your video will be forgotten in seconds.

2. Wow Your Audience With a Great Intro

The hotel industry relies on effective videos to promote their services to prospective customers on the Web. A brief intro is the most essential part of your video as you will want to capture your viewers’ attention from the second they watch it. Remember to keep your intro direct and short. It must tell the viewer everything about your hotel while at the same time set the tone for the rest of your content. By incorporating an intro video into your website’s homepage, you will be able to successfully grab your visitors’ attention.

3. Make Your Video Stand Out

If you want to create a unique video, you must first highlight all the unique features of your hotel. Your business has a rich story behind it and you must emit this through your video. Find out what makes your business stand out from others and emphasize on that. Only then will you be able to find your tone and uniqueness. Whether your tone is inspiring, passionate, or serious, you need to think of all the characteristics that make your particular hotel different from all the ones in your location and portray these in a positive tone of voice on your video.

Adding value to your hotel video doesn’t mean creating a sales pitch that’s all about your brand. You should think of video marketing as an opportunity for adding value at every stage of the potential customer’s online journey. While you might think that it’s easy to produce a great hotel marketing video without much pre-planning, in reality, you could end up with a low-quality content that will only harm your brand. It is, therefore, important to start with a script to keep your filming crew on track and your viewers engaged.

5. Share Your Video With Your Audience

Another important tip for your video marketing campaign is that you must enable your video to be shared on your other social media channels. This will help spread the video from one platform to another and reach a wider audience. YouTube is one of the most important social media sites since millions of people use this platform to watch videos every month. You need to include a link to your website on your YouTube video so your audience can visit your homepage after watching your video. Remember to use 360-degree shots of the hotel’s rooms and facilities as customers will get a closer look at the hotel and will feel comfortable staying there.

360 and Virtual Reality Videos for The Hotel Industry

Virtual reality goes beyond just video games and entertainment. With the continuing advancements of this technology, it now offers an interactive guest experience through immersive headsets and 360-degree videos. Nowadays, many kinds of businesses are benefiting from VR, and the hotel industry is no exception.

Difference Between 360 and Virtual Videos

One big difference between the two is that the images in a virtual reality video are created digitally whereas a 360-degree video is captured from a real-life setting. These live videos capture real places exactly as you would see them in everyday life, unlike virtual reality where a virtual environment is created for the purpose of interacting with.

Why Are 360 VR Hotel Videos Becoming So Popular?

Virtual reality has the power to transport people from one exotic place to another and this is the reason why the hotel industry is increasingly using VR and 360 videos for promoting their brand. A 360 video invites people into a scene and offers them an accurate picture of where they will be staying. This makes the hotel guests feel more comfortable placing their trust in that hotel and the chances of booking a room will be greater.

5 Great Examples of Powerful Hotel Videos

Video marketing is a powerful tool that helps luxury hotels grab the attention of the audience and engage them throughout the online journey. Here are 5 great examples of hotel videos on YouTube:

#Video 1: Byzantino Boutique Hotel Monemvasia in Greece

The video of Byzantino Boutique Hotel, located inside the castle of Monemvasia, provides guests with a 360-degree view of the hotel’s location and its facilities. The video of this hotel taps into the viewers’ different emotions in relation to travel, relaxation, and getting a sense of luxury. The aim is to encourage visitors to explore the sights of Greece and stay in this luxury hotel.

#Video 2: Kalima Resort and Spa in Thailand

This 3-minute promotional video features the hotel’s rooms, facilities, and all the activities guests can take part in. The visual content is the most important part of this video as all the images are blended together in harmony. The effective call to action at the end of the video prompts viewers to visit the hotel’s website.

#Video 3: Holiday Inn Express in Adelaide, Australia

This newly-built hotel offers a 2-minute 360-degree tour of its premises with special emphasis on the hotel’s features including conference rooms, bar, fitness facilities, and of course its rooms. The tour allows viewers to see the whole hotel in true lighting and proper proportions as though they are actually in the hotel themselves.

#Video 4: Agrovela Hotel Alacati in Turkey

The short movie-like video presents the authentic aspects of the destination, the characterful hotel rooms, and the visitors’ experiences within this charming Turkish village. The 2-minute video mainly focuses on elaborated and intimate moments of people enjoying themselves in a rustic hotel so you get a good feel of what the hotel has to offer.

#Video 5: Cape Dara in Pattaya in Thailand

The immersive 360° VR Walkthrough of the 5-star luxury resort allows viewers to visualise the hotel before making a booking. The main focus of this video is on the guests’ experiences. The audience gets a sense of the scale and size of the rooms as well as the hotel’s exotic surroundings.

As the world of technology evolves, so should your hotel marketing strategies. Powerful videos that take the viewers’ experience to another level are growing at a rapid rate. If you haven’t yet started optimizing your audience’s engagement through videos, now is the time to start putting your strategy into practice.

Ramy Ayoub

The post 5 Essential Video Marketing Tips for Hotels appeared first on Ramy Ayoub.

Whether you’re a professional video producer, TV producer, film creator, video game producer or a home/hobby creator of content for social media, sooner rather than later you’re going to want to add music to your productions.

The music has an important role in enriching the emotional impact of any video, and there is always going to be a trade-off between how perfectly the music conveys the mood and message of your production, versus how much time and – perhaps most importantly – how much time you’re willing to invest in finding that perfect music.

Most producers go to online Stock Music libraries, often referred to as royalty-free music sites, to find music and there is no doubt a huge amount of music out there to choose from, but when you’re literally trying to find gems among tens of millions of music tracks, how can you do this with the least amount of hassle, and with the best possible outcome?

Quality Curated vs Self-uploading Mass Content

When choosing your source for royalty-free music I recommend that you quickly establish whether a site operates with a curated collection of stock music tracks, or whether they practice a «free for all» mass uploading by anybody who wants to contribute.

If the site represents the latter category, you should be aware that anybody who considers themselves a bit of a musician can just create an account and start uploading – and this content will go more or less unfiltered straight out to the users. This means that you will be sifting through thousands of music tracks of highly varying artistic and technical quality. There will be some good music in there, no doubt. Unfortunately, there will be a lot of very mediocre (or worse) music and you will just have to find your way. How much time are you willing to spend on this?

On the other hand, if you choose a stock music site with a smaller roster of artists who are vetted, guided, properly contracted and hired to produce a smaller amount of music, but to a higher quality – such as Shockwave-Sound, — you will be browsing only music tracks that have been curated by a team of professionals, so you’ll probably save yourself a lot of time and frustration. Maybe you’ll pay a few bucks more for a track, but ultimately, the time and frustration you save yourself could be worth it. I guess it depends on your budget and how much you value your time.

When to Use the Underscore Track Rather than the Full Track

A mistake I often hear being made in video productions is the failure to choose the underscore mix of a royalty-free music track, rather than the full, melodic mix. The «underscore» is usually a slightly different, alternative mix-down of a music track, where the main, outstanding and melody-leading instruments or vocals have been removed from the mix, making the music interfere with the voices in your video to a much lesser degree. This is sometimes also referred to as a «bed track».

As a video producer, getting the volume balance between the background music and the foreground vocals / dialogue / instructions etc. is difficult and if your music has loud, outstanding or busy lead melodies, it will compete against the vocal track of your film.

If you are going to mix music and a vocal/dialogue track, be sure to use a royalty-free music library where tracks are also available in an underscore version, such as that at Shockwave-Sound, where nearly all tracks have the option of choosing the underscore / background music mix; Here is just one example: The delicate, flowing and romantic royalty-free music River of Life is available as a full track, an underscore version without the main melody and in this case also a «No drums or bass» version which can also be suitable in some settings.

Selection of Royalty-free Classical Music

There may be cases when you are looking for a particular piece of classical music for your project; in these cases you probably already know exactly which piece you want to use, so your job is not so much looking for the right composition, but rather looking for the right recording – and, as with royalty-free music in general, also here there is a wide range of different quality grades.

From the lowest, somebody having downloaded a piece of music as a General MIDI track and applied some samples to it, then exported it and are offering it for sale as royalty free music (it may surprise you, but there is a lot of this out there), to more reputable companies actually hiring professional musicians to play the music by hand and have it recorded in real recording studios. It goes without saying that it costs a lot more to get 5 professional string players to play a Mozart piece and have it recorded in studio, than it does for somebody to download the same piece as a MIDI file and put it out on a royalty-free music file; which explains why you can pick up the same piece of music for $4 or even less in some places, but you are asked to pay $40 to license a single piece of music from another place. But which recording would you rather have in your production, and what is that worth to you? Here is an article about royalty-free classical music and some of the work that goes into it, if you’re interested in learning more.

Availability of Stem Files

If you’re of the type who likes to dig a bit deeper, take your productions up a notch and really go in-depth into the use of music in your production, how it interacts with your video or your story, perhaps have the music weave in and out of your production and have it match your content more precisely, perhaps you’d like to choose stock music / royalty-free music content that offers stem files.

«Stem files» is a way to describe a music recording where the different layers, instruments, or main instrument groups are supplied in separate audio files. This enables you to individually control the different elements and layers within the music, and even have the mix between them, or the inclusion or exclusion of the different layers, to change as your timeline progresses, bringing different sounds and parts of the music in/out of the total sound mix, as your film or video content progresses. Having this deeper control over how the music is made part of your total audio mix, with some clever work and a bit of time and effort, you can make the music sound more like it was created especially for your film, like a bespoke, custom made soundtrack.

In this YouTube video I show an example of working with stem files in Adobe Audition, but the same methods apply also to any multi-track video editing software environment. If you are interested in «going deep» with applying ready-made production music tracks to your media, be sure to choose a royalty free music site with stem files.

Option to Clear YouTube Use at Purchase Stage

If you’re a YouTuber and regularly produce videos for publishing at YouTube, you will no doubt already be familiar with the somewhat annoying copyright claim on YouTube videos. A copyright claim is automatically generated for your video, if YouTube’s automated content detection system («Content-ID») detects music or video content in your video which is copyrighted to somebody.

Also Royalty-free music / stock music is copyrighted to somebody – usually the creator. Remember that when you buy a royalty free music track from a site, the music is still under copyright. You get permission to use the music, but you don’t «own» it. The creator still owns it.

If a copyright claim is generated for a video that you’ve uploaded, even if you’ve paid to download the music from a royalty-free music site, firstly, take a breath, this may be a bit annoying, but it’s not dramatic. Remember that the «copyright claim» is not the same as a «Copyright complaint» or «Copyright infringement notice». A copyright claim is a much softer and less dramatic message which, rightly, stops you from monetizing your video, but it does not have any negative effect on your YouTube account standing, and it does not cause your video to be blocked or muted.

Usually, it’s just a question of a little bit of administration to get the copyright claim lifted from your video, so you can monetize it. You may need to provide some license information, or to contact the site where you bought the music and ask them to release the copyright claim on your video.

A new and better way to handle this has been implemented on a few, forward-thinking royalty free music sites, such as Shockwave-Sound. When you place an order here, during the checkout process you are invited to input the link to your YouTube channel. The music is then allow-listed for use on your channel. This process typically takes 4-12 hours typically.

So unless you are very quick to upload your video to YouTube after licensing the music, by the time you upload your video, the music you licensed will already have been allow-listed for your channel – avoiding the copyright claim altogether.

Ramy Ayoub

The post Things to Consider When Using Royalty-Free Music and Stock Music Sites appeared first on Ramy Ayoub.