A new survey commissioned by NW Systems, targeting hotel and leisure businesses using its Streamdays live webcam service, found that 92% had increased customer awareness of their facilities as a result of using the service.
The businesses surveyed included hotels based all over the world, and also included national tourist attractions and nature reserves. Of these businesses, almost a quarter (24%) had recorded a direct link between the webcam on their website and an increase in sales or bookings.
Hotels and resorts benefitting from the webcam service were located across the UK and Ireland – and as far afield as Mexico and the Maldives. As well as driving greater traffic to their websites (86% had noted an increase), for many hotels and other businesses this was just the beginning of the story. They are also using it to enhance their web presence and engage with customers online.
Almost three quarters of respondents (74%) had used the webcam as part of their wider social media marketing activity, by sharing the webcam feed on Facebook – amongst other social media channels. The result, for 61% of the total businesses surveyed, was a measurable increase in ‘awareness of the business online and on social media channels’.
Anecdotal responses revealed that for many businesses, the live webcam had become an indispensable part of their overall approach to customer engagement. One respondent described their camera as ‘something that connects [our business] to the members who use it’. For a hotel or resort boasting a unique location, an outdoor webcam can instantly connect prospective guests with this key selling point – and let them know what to expect.
For the tech-savvy hospitality business, content like streaming video can also help to move websites up the search engine rankings and become instantly more visible to potential customers. The possibility of using the webcam service to enhance a business’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy was evident to many of the survey respondents.
Of hotel and leisure sector players questioned, 49% had ascertained that the live stream had boosted their position on search engine results for key search terms. A further 41% were unsure – indicating that not all businesses were fully aware of the potential benefits in this area.
Steve Pailthorpe, managing director of SEO specialists Iconic Digital, commented on the findings: “Embedded videos within a website significantly improve the ranking performance of landing pages. The problem is that most web managers simply embed video without applying the appropriate tagging thus losing valuable link traffic to the page. The positioning of video web content on the page is also vital. Place video viewers along the top banner and down the left of the front page for best results.”
Streamdays is at www.streamdays.com