What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 30 March 2015

Welcome to another week at Cloud 9 and as we've recently launched our own YouTube Channel, we thought we'd share a few tips we've learnt along the way! 

“2015 is the year of the video”. You hear this sentence time and time again and it can be seen all over the internet. Everyone is talking about the rise of video and how video marketing is, without doubt, the future of content marketing. While everyone within the events and meetings industry admits to knowing that video is the way forward, we're still not using video to its full potential. (we have to admit we've still got a way to go but we're giving it a go!).

Below is a sneak peek of Meeting Booker's findings and how hotels can use video to drive more bookings...

Use video to increase social engagement

Recent Twitter research revealed that Tweets featuring a vine video get 256% more engagement than
tweets with no video. 256%. That’s a phenomenal difference. Sharing video on your Twitter or Instagram can help you get a huge following and will also encourage customers to share their own videos and tag you in them. Posts that include video on both Instagram and Twitter are a lot more likely to be seen and shared than posts which contain just text or images.

Use video to attract people to your website

Site visitors who view video on the hotel website’s homepage stay, on average, two minutes longer than visitors who just view text. Making video available can also make customers happier with the likelihood of a customer making an online booking or requesting a proposal said to increase by as much as 67% if a video tour is available.

Use video to increase conversion rates in emails

Did you know that including video in the body of an email can now increase conversion rates by up to 50% for hotel bookings? Video content in email marketing used to be considered something of a trend, but in recent years it has become more of a standard marketing technique.

The reason a lot of people opt not to include videos in their emails is that video can take up a large amount of memory and space, and many mail clients will not support large video files in the body of an email. To get around this problem, you can make a thumbnail image of the video and include that in the body of the email instead.

Use video to get a page 1 ranking on Google

There are four key ways in which video can help increase your sites’ SEO. First off, video will improve your sites SERP ranking. Pages with video are in fact 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results than pages without video. Secondly, having a video encourages more people to click, thus attracting more people to your site. Thirdly, visitors to your homepage will usually stay two minutes longer on your site on than sites without video and finally video is great for link building.

Use video to showcase your venue on YouTube

According to Google’s first ever YouTube White Paper, 89% of leisure travelers and 93% of business travelers watch online travel videos before going somewhere. A great way to advertise your hotel is to

pay for your video to be shown at the beginning of popular YouTube videos.

While most YouTube watchers are interested in community-generated content, the majority of travel-related views are for professionally released videos. In fact, views of branded videos are up 394% year on year, making YouTube an excellent platform to showcase your property and attract more bookings.

We hope this has been helpful and maybe given you the motivation to use the power of video, but if not then don't let that stop you looking at our efforts! 

So, that's it for this week folks and don't forget it's just a month away until the CHS Awards, so book your tickets here. 

Have a great week folks!