When you want to attract new businesses, residents, and tourists to your town, you need certain essential promotional materials.
First, it’s important that all towns, regardless of their size, have a website. A website doesn’t just give you the opportunity to explain in detail what attractions can be found within your borders; it also ensures that citizens who live there know how to take advantage of key services.
However, while a website is certainly useful, you’re not doing everything you can to showcase your town without a professional video. These days, it’s easier than ever to share your video with potential visitors. Along with hosting it on your site, you can also share it on YouTube and social media, so that it reaches as many people as possible.
A video allows town governments to show off their communities in a dynamic, visually-appealing way. With a professional video, your community will enjoy the following key benefits:
Highlighting Attractions
If you want to highlight any key attractions in your town that visitors might be interested in, be sure to include images and descriptions of the attractions on your website. You’re essentially “selling” your town to tourists and potential resident considering a move. To some extent, you want to treat it like a product.
That said, while images and text can sell the appeal of an attraction, historic site, or popular tourist destination to a degree, you’ll get better results from a video.
Obviously, a professional video is more visually-interesting than images alone. Visual appeal is just one reason video is more effective, though. Video also allows you to generate an emotional reaction in viewers. Professional video production teams can add music so that potential visitors associate your town with positive, upbeat feelings. They can integrate text and voiceovers to share key pieces of information about your community. More importantly, they allow you to organize the content of your message so that viewers learn everything you want them to about attractions in your small town.
You can’t be certain that someone who visits your website will take the time to thoroughly explore it. Even if they do see pictures of your local attractions, they may not bother to read any of the text you’ve included describing it. However, if a person watches a video, they’ll see dynamic images of your featured local attractions, while also quickly absorbing any information you wish to share about them. This makes it easier to highlight all the appealing details of your community’s popular destinations.
Boosting Shareability
If you study internet user behavior, especially as it pertains to social media, you often find that people tend to share certain types of content more than others online. It’s highly unlikely that many people who visit your website will share any content from it on their social media profiles. Even if they’re impressed with a description of a particular attraction or historic area, they probably won’t post it on Facebook or Twitter. That’s simply because they know their friends and followers probably won’t click on it.
Video, on the other hand, is a very shareable form of content. That’s partially due to the fact that it can be embedded on social media sites. If someone were to share a page from your town website on their Facebook page, for instance, anyone who clicks on it would be redirected to your website so they could read the content. With so much content already distracting internet users, it’s hard to get people to consume yours this way.
On the other hand, if someone were to share your video on their Facebook page, anyone who clicks on it could potentially watch the video right there without having to leave Facebook, so long as it was properly embedded. Thus, they’ll be more likely to actually devote their attention to the content. The process of consuming it is simply much less time-consuming.
Why Professionalism Matters
Keep in mind, a video isn’t going to be effective if it isn’t professional-quality. Any content you host on your website represents your community. You need to make the right impression on visitors. You wouldn’t post a description of your town that was riddled with typing errors and organizational problems.
The same principle applies to any video you choose to host on your website. Hiring professionals to make your video is essential. They know how to edit a video to share the most amount of information and images in the shortest span of time, without confusing a viewer. Most importantly, they produce quality content that will represent your town in the most flattering light.
Attracting businesses, residents, and tourists to a small town doesn’t need to be difficult. You just need to use the most effective tools at your disposal. Video is one of them. By hosting a video on your website, you’ll give visitors the chance to learn about your community quickly, in an entertaining format.
