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How to create videos that inspire

Using the travel industry as an example, read the blog below to gain top tips to help you create videos that inspire!

Google famously described the first stage of the travel purchase journey as ‘dreaming’*, and they would know. The average traveller – and there are a lot of us, with 1.5 billion tourist arrivals in 2019 according to the UNWTO World Tourism Barometer – spends 13% of their time online engaged in travel-related activities.

Some of this relates to researching specific destinations, but much is just browsing. These people are waiting to dream of somewhere specific, they just don’t know where it is yet. Sales and marketing
budgets suffered at many travel companies over the pandemic, causing awareness of specific brands to drop.

Given the high level of customer hesitancy and the fierce competition of a market trying to get back on its feet, this lack of awareness could be a critical disadvantage. As Seth Borko, Wouter Geerts and Haixia Wang, authors of the Skift report The Travel Industry Turned Upside Down, wrote: “Travel is about anticipation. Excitement for upcoming travel has now been replaced with anxiety and uncertainty. Travel companies must find ways to build anticipation again.”

Video can play the leading role in boosting brand awareness and building anticipation by capturing the imagination of these would-be travellers. When it’s well-crafted, online video content is more attention-grabbing, more memorable and easier to consume than extensive written copy, with Wooshii’s 2021 consumer survey finding that 62% of people are inspired by video when deciding on holidays. “The right video can communicate more in under 10 seconds than the most manicured bit of prose ever could,” says Sam Bruce, co-founder of Much Better Adventures. “Capturing people’s attention through copy is extremely hard, and that’s where video can really come into its own.”

“THE RIGHT VIDEO CAN COMMUNICATE MORE IN UNDER 10 SECONDS THAN THE MOST MANICURED BIT OF PROSE EVER COULD”

SAM BRUCE, Co-Founder of Much Better Adventures

Video also increasingly reaches more people than text or TV. According to eMarketer research from 20204, 70% of the UK population view digital video at least once a month, an increase of 3% from 2019. This figure includes 42 million people who view content on YouTube, 26 million on Netflix and 16.5 million on Amazon Prime.

Advertisers are responding to meet consumers’ growing preference for video, with ad investment in the medium forecast by WARC Data to increase 13% this year, and by Statista to increase by a further 21% before 2025, despite the expected impact of Covid.

HOW TO GET IT RIGHT

01. Keep it short. As these ads are most likely to be viewed in social media feeds and on platforms such as YouTube, it is essential that they are visually enticing enough to be able to grab attention quickly. Beautifully shot, high-quality ‘micro videos’ of under 15 seconds are most effective at the top of the sales funnel, allowing travel brands to give a taste of the experiences they’re offering while consumers are still in their dreaming phase.

02. Tailor to market segments. Covid has increased the fragmentation of the travel market, not only by type and geography but by vaccination status, demographics and risk appetite. As TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer told Skift, this creates a marketing challenge: “Travel inspiration is really hard. It’s very personalised. What may inspire you may be really trivial to me.” The beauty of digital channels is that you can tailor and target your ads to the segments you most expect to respond.

03. Bring it to a point. With so much competition for attention, it’s important to include a strong call to action, but this doesn’t have to be blatantly salesy. United’s 15-second YouTube campaign from 2019, for example, rewound a sequence of exhilarating experiences of sunlit coves and bustling markets to a single moment – a person booking on its mobile site; that year the company reported that this ad was responsible for 52% of all its YouTube click-through conversions.

04. Don’t be afraid to use your brand. Focus groups conducted by the IAB and Differentology found video ads that mentioned the brand upfront and showed its logo were more effective than those that didn’t.

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By reading this blog and downloading the accompanying report below, you’ll gain critical insight into the role that video can play at every stage of your marketing funnel. We’ll provide you with a step-by-step guide that will allow you to inspire your customers with high-quality content; improve engagement through excellent storytelling and reassure those who are still too hesitant to travel internationally.

We also discuss the one silver-lining of the pandemic – ethical travel and how customers are now demanding responsible travel policies. In addition, we explore the important role that video can play in the re-emergence of business travel.

2 https://www.statista.com/statistics/611707/online-video-time-spent/
3 https://websitebuilder.org/blog/video-marketing-statistics/
* The other four are ‘planning, booking, experiencing and sharing’. We would add ‘reassuring’, as we will explore later.

4 https://www.emarketer.com/content/uk-digital-video-2020

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