Think about your city as a whole. What is your favorite local restaurant to go to? What is your favorite thing to do? When you go out with friends, do you do one thing or visit multiple places in one outing? What makes your city unique?
Tourism is vital to cities because it brings revenue to the local economy and creates jobs. Since tourism can be a significant revenue source for your city, your city must ensure it promotes itself well. Tourism marketing highlights your city’s unique features, such as food, attractions, public areas, hotels, etc. One great way to bring attention to your city is by utilizing UGC, or user-generated content, by instructing visitors to take photos or videos when visiting your city. UGC lets you see how visitors view your city and allows them to amplify their experience.
Let’s break down various ways visitors can amplify your city through UGC.
Restaurants
Food brings people together, and unique food will make people want to visit your city to try it! One way to incorporate UGC into your business is by asking customers to record a video showing how much they enjoy your food! A good way to encourage customers to take videos in your restaurant is to make sure your restaurant looks attractive, aka insta worthy.
You can even incentives visitors with a free dessert or 10% off their next meal if they take a video showing their experience and tag your socials. This way, the customer gets to capture a fun memory, and they will get a discount on their next meal, making them want to return! Plus, your brand gains exposure to their followers, giving you more brand awareness. Most importantly, your restaurant can repost the UGC, showing potential customers how much people love your food, which boosts revenue for your restaurant.
A good example of this is The Hampton Social. Their restaurant is decorated uniquely, making people want to visit and take pictures and videos! Tap here for example!
Hotels
Hotels are super important when it comes to tourism. People need a safe and trustworthy place to stay; positive reviews are critical. One way to ensure your hotel has a positive and safe brand image is to encourage guests to share photos and videos of themselves enjoying their stay! You can invite them to create content by making it part of the hotel experience. For example, in return, they can get hotel rewards or points that they can use in the future. Your hotel can do this by handing them a flier when they check in with instructions on fun ways to create UGC, such as taking a video of their room or a video at the hotel’s pool!
An easy way to get them to create UGC is to have them scan a QR code and access a site to capture a video (Vidlo is the perfect solution for this! Keep reading to learn more). After capturing their videos, they can post them on social media and tag your hotel. This way, when potential customers see these posts, they will trust your hotel and feel more inclined to visit your city and stay there!
Tap here to see an example of the type of content guests can make. Guests can take photos and videos of their families having fun at your hotel!
Cruise ships
Cruise ships are a great attraction to your city! You can get an influx of visitors to your city via the cruise, so you want to make sure you give them a reason to return. Since people can participate in fun activities on the cruise ship, it’s an excellent opportunity to take entertaining videos.
A great way to encourage UGC is to ask people to take videos at one of the events on the ship! When they post their videos, potential customers will become excited and want to experience it for themselves. You can even offer a discount for something on the cruise ship if they post their UGC on socials. This way, their experience gets enhanced, and your cruise ship gets authentic content to post.
A good example of making content on a cruise ship is with Disney Cruise Line! Tap here to check how a creator made a video showing all the food she had on the cruise ship, making viewers want to experience it for themselves!
Airports
Many people dread going to airports. So, why not make an area for them to have fun? Creating a designated area for them to create content allows passengers to relax and have fun. This way, they have a better experience at the airport, and more people would want to fly to your city rather than take other forms of transportation.
A great example of this is Singapore’s Changi Airport! They have an entertainment center connected to their airport called Jewel Changi Airport. Tap here to see the great photo ops, such as this Avengers one: .This helps people make unique memories and makes them want to visit the airport for this unique feature.
Museums
Museums are full of art, history, and experiences! Your museum can see what attracts visitors by asking visitors to take videos of themselves in front of their favorite piece. This way, your museum can highlight certain parts or content on social media, allowing people to want to see the experience for themselves. By utilizing UGC in your museum’s marketing, you can highlight how much fun visitors have.
Some museums are all about taking pictures and videos! One example is the WNDR Museum. Tap here to see how they repost visitors’ pictures and encourage people to come to visit the museum for themselves to take similar pictures.
According to Skeepers, “85% of consumers start planning their trip or holiday by researching online”. Your city would benefit greatly if they had positive reviews, or videos, of visitors enjoying themselves at multiple places! This would cause people to be more likely to visit your city. Using UGC as a marketing strategy in tourism benefits each business and brings the companies in your town together to feel more like a community! Let’s say a museum and restaurant want to collaborate; setting up a UGC campaign that includes both locations would increase business for both places! This increases revenue for all businesses.
One good way to easily create a UGC campaign is to use Vidlo. Vidlo allows you to create a UGC campaign in minutes, and you can personalize it to fit your brand! The best part is, Vidlo stores all the UGC made on your dashboard, so your brand can repurpose and utilize the videos in your marketing strategy. To learn more, tap here!
UGC is a great way to help increase business for your city and help with tourism marketing overall. It is extremely important to make your city attractive so that people want to come and visit! By allowing visitors to create content for you, you are getting authentic videos from them to share with potential visitors, encouraging them to make plans to visit. As a bonus, setting up a UGC campaign is quick and easy with Vidlo, and it only takes a few minutes! So, set up a campaign today, and your city will start gaining popularity and revenue.