Visual sales & marketing tools, as with many sales & marketing tools, provide a lot of options to choose from, some good and some not so good. The most important thing to remember, as with any tools that assist you with your sales & marketing efforts, is to be clear about what your objectives are and how those tools best fit with those objectives.
It’s also worth remembering that when a high-value tool is seemingly too cheap, then your natural instinct probably isn’t too far off and a buying-decision could end up costing you much more in the long-run (wasted time as well as financial expense).
360º, particularly when combined with VR (Virtual Reality) is becoming an increasingly popular purchase as a marketing tool for hotels & venues. However, we’ve also noted that amongst its earliest adopters, it is also fast becoming a tool that is discarded with venue marketers proclaiming it doesn’t live up to the hype or provide them with the solutions to solve their problems. This is a worrying trend and one that we’ve seen particularly prevalent amongst North American hotels & venues, who began adopting 360º tools in the last 3-5 years, in most cases a good 2 years ahead of their European and Asian counterparts. So, what’s causing them to abandon the tool, especially when European and Asian hotels & venues are just adopting it?
The first issue is a psychological one that’s tricky to overcome. People buy want they want, not what they need. We’re all suckers for great marketing and the seemingly newest, coolest gadgets. We’re all familiar with the idiom ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’, and if your competition has VR, then you need VR, right?
Wrong. Not if it doesn’t meet with your specific objectives, and not if it’s not going to help you drive revenue.
Understanding and placing the business problem into the right context is essential before embarking on any new approach and/or solutions. This is especially relevant when it comes to the deployment of technology, which - it is often forgotten - should be used to ENABLE. Technology is not THE solution, it is what helps enable you and your teams to resolve your pain and it is this subtle yet fundamental philosophy that will allow you to unlock the value of technological use. Business problems need to follow a simple process to achieve the right outcomes. We identify this process as follows:
(a) clearly understand the business problem(s),
AND
(b) have clear objectives attached to them,
BEFORE
(c) making a decision on how a technology should be used i.e. its principle purpose,
AND
(d) deciding on what technology should be used to achieve the principle purpose.
Far too often we see businesses fall into the trap of loosely understanding ‘A’ before by-passing ‘B’ and ‘C’ entirely, moving straight to ‘D’. This process leads to technology pitfalls and poorly thought out solutions, which lack engagement and end up costing the business more in the long run.
360º is, as you would expect it to be, a photographic image that captures the entire environment, enabling you to have a 360º view of that environment, whether it be an outdoors or indoor space. By virtue of the fact that a screen is not 360º, we may often require hardware in order to gain the full advantage of 360º visuals, depending on how you intend to use it.
Video is “an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media” (Wikipedia).
The critical words here are “moving visual media”. Far too often, we see the words 360º and video coupled together despite the output not being video.
A number of the 360º tools promoted within the hospitality industry and described as “video” are not, in fact, video. They are a sequence of photographs stitched together to enable you to view a space in 360º and to click and move through that space. This is very different to motion picture (video) that plays automatically and still allows you to navigate through 360º. The latter, as you would be correct in surmising, is much more expensive to shoot, especially to achieve a high enough quality visual output. For example, if you want to achieve 4k resolution output, you need be capturing the image in 16k. However, capture and delivery are not the same; capturing 16k video is much easier than the actual delivery of the experience.
How so?...
The hardware required to deliver what has been shot requires improved file compression & delivery methods, view optimized streaming, plus quicker & more stable bandwidth (we’re all used to complaining about the WiFi, right?). However, that’s just the support infrastructure and delivery processes, the headset hardware also needs to improve to do justice to 16k video capture, which means improving (widening) the Field of View (FOV) and increasing screen resolutions to ensure we don’t get motion sickness. To add a little more context, the human eye has a 160º FOV, yet the best headsets on the market currently only provide a 110º FOV. Finally, you have to place all this into context in terms of scalability for commercial use. If you’re going to go to all the effort and expense of capturing 360º/VR video, you want your customers to be able to engage with the content, beyond your attendance at one or two trade shows every year, but that means all of your customers are required to invest in expensive hardware to engage with your content. In practical terms, we’re a long way away from this. If you walk into any corporate or agency office, you don’t see teams of event planners donning VR headsets checking out venues. So, back to ‘understanding the business problem’, has the deployment of this technology met with your objectives and your principal purpose?
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360º video is, therefore, rarely being used in the hospitality industry, largely because it’s expensive to produce and its scalability & reach is currently limited for the reasons outlined.
Now we’ve established what 360º video is, let’s take a look at the 360º photographic tools that are being utilised in the industry, and contrast this with the use of video (not 360º video, but normal video). There are key differences in the use of 360º photographic tools compared with the use of video, in precisely the same way as there are different and complementary uses of photography and video, which - ultimately - has a different use case. Let’s take a look….
Photography
Useful for your website, social media, sales brochures and for inserting into proposals. Shot well, photography can have the impact of drawing a customer into your sales funnel and enabling you to begin the conversation. Invariably, the customer will need to physically visit your venue - particularly for larger events - and assess whether the impression provided by your photography matches with reality. They will also wish to assess the broader features and location of your venue and - ultimately - decide whether it’s the right fit for them. In a digital world, great photography is essential but is a media that supports the sales & marketing process rather than a major pull factor.
Photography is highly competitive and accessible, which means you need to be careful about quality control. If you employ a digital agency to manage your website, then they may have a list of recommended photographers who have experience of shooting for web as well as for other digital media. Excellent freelancers are also widely available and should be able to provide you with a portfolio of their work.
360º Photographic Tools
There are a range of different products on the market, and they can be a useful tool for your website enabling event planners to get a panoramic view of your venue. Providers have stitched together static imagery to enable an event planner to click through the space from one photographic frame to the next. Whilst this has some use beyond standard photography, the usage is limited if you look at a typical sales & marketing funnel. The tools don’t lend themselves very well to marketing initiatives to engage and pull in prospective customers as part of venue lead generation initiatives.
They may have some usability in the lead nurture (educational) phase but are reported to have greater usability post-purchase. Whilst venues may wish to provide planners with tools to assist them with their event organisation post winning the business, the most important focus is being in with a shout of winning the business in the first instance, which means deploying tools that will assist with effective lead generation and nurture.
The two best known 360º photographic tools currently on the market are Google Indoor Street View and Matterport. The latter has added integrated an additional mapping tool dubbed the ‘Dolls House’, allowing users to see a 3D image of the venue. These tools gained a lot of traction amongst US venues in the last 3-5 years and have recently been gaining traction in Europe too. Indeed, we had our own Google licensed photographer 3 years ago and offered the solution to venues, but we ceased providing the service after event planners informed us they found the tools difficult and cumbersome to use and that they preferred our interactive video product.
In the intervening years, US venue clients have reported that the tools are not fit for the sales & marketing requirements and some venue operators have expressed their concerns at the unfettered ‘warts and all’ approach to capturing their spaces, which may not portray the venue at its best. Further, capturing all of the venue space, in this manner, allows an event planner to effectively ‘wander’ around your venue unguided. You wouldn’t allow this to happen if an event planner physically turned up at your venue, so the obvious question is why allow it virtually?
Video
Video is increasingly being used as a complement to photography and more and more venue marketers are considering video as a ‘must have’ but venue marketing budgets often don’t stretch this far. Venue owners and operators need to start considering the opportunity cost of not having video given some of the consumer statistics that demonstrate a demand for video content.
*Stats from Social Media Today
As for budget, venues should now be considering the opportunity costs of not investing in some form of video content. If you’re running digital marketing campaigns, then it’s likely they’re not as effective if video is absent). Those competitors with video will be utilising content across multiple channels and driving higher customer engagement and business conversion than you (70% of marketing professionals report video converts better than any other mediums*.
360º Video
As covered earlier in the article, 360º video has its use cases but it is expensive, adoption is low and the use cases have not been well established. In fact, we believe VR will largely be by-passed as technology moves on and we see solutions providing AR (Augmented Reality) and MR (Mixed Reality). All we can say on this is watch this space….
Interactive Video
Interactive video is a media that has been used in advertising for many years and is one of our areas of specialism. Interactive video takes the power of motion picture video and provides a level of flexibility that generates engagement measured at more than 6x greater than standard video.
The Eventopedia EXPLORE tool is a white label interactive video solution that enables venue sales & marketing teams to have a flexible branded video solution that operates across multiple platforms and provides video assets for a variety of functions, from web & social media use, to field sales calls, exhibition stand usage, in-room television content, elevator content, you name it! EXPLORE focuses upon interactive visual storytelling to lead audiences on a journey of discovery and provides them with the control to navigate to the content they wish to view, much like a website. You can check out our EXPLORE product here.
Although you can expect the price of each solution to increase from Photography (at the bottom) to Interactive Video and 360º Video at the top, the real cost can only be measured in terms of the opportunity cost of not delivering a solution that matches your objectives (and thus costs more in the long-run), and the opportunity cost of business lost to competitors / reducing market share.
Let’s use an example of the right approach using the ‘A’ to ‘D’method outlined earlier, from the perspective of a venue sales & marketing team.
(a) Clearly understanding the Business problems
We are trying to reach and attract event planners from different locations who do not have the time or budget to physically visit our venue. Photography has its uses but it never does justice to our venue and it doesn’t set us apart from our competition.
(b) Business objective
We require a more engaging way to showcase our venue and set ourselves apart from the competition. We need to provide a solution to event planners who don’t have the time or budget to visit us in person, a solution that is informative for the planner and clearly identifies our unique selling points (USPs), as if we were providing them with a show round in person. We require a set of tools that can be used for both sales & marketing purposes, not just one or the other.
(c) What is the principal purpose of a solution and how could a technology be deployed to support this?
The way to properly answer this question is to do so from the customer perspective. A customer-centric approach will always ensure the right outcome for your business problem and objective. The technology as a gimmick examples we provided earlier, demonstrated that the customer felt dissatisfied and short changed by the experience.
So, the principal purpose is to create engaging content that is going to inform the event planner of the key pieces of information, including our USPs, that will help them make an informed decision of where to use for their next event. In serving up this content, we need to consider
(i) how we replicate selling to them in person, because this has been assessed, practised, refined and we convert business more effectively this way;
(ii) how, therefore, we control the narrative and what that narrative should be (see point i);
(iii) how we invoke emotion and a meaningful connection with the planner;
(iv) how we provide the planner with an element of control and functionality required to obtain more information;
(v) how we deploy ‘calls to action’ to encourage the client further down the sales funnel
(d) What technology do we utilise to achieve these business objectives?
Video and virtual reality technologies can certainly both be utilised to achieve the outlined objectives, but have you noticed how your perspective has changed on what the technology needs to achieve, and how it also transcends the technology itself to focus on the message?
Objectives (i) – (iii) focus upon the narrative. This requires specific expertise to understand what story you wish to convey, as well as how to execute that story, especially when seeking to create emotion and engagement. These are not easy feats to achieve and the correct technology is simply the medium by which you will convey these critical messages. Objectives (iv) and (v) concentrate more on the user experience, and thus what the correct technology should be and how it should be used to satisfy the customers’ needs. Both virtual reality and video (note I’m not being specific about 360º video as I don’t believe it meets these specific objectives), must offer an immersive and/or engaging experience that conveys ‘relevant’ information to the customer.
We predict the next big thing in hospitality will be a change of mindset, not a new technology or platform. The right technologies and platforms already exist, it’s about the manner in which the medium is used to broadcast the message, and that requires a shift in perspective.
