Wrightsville Beach recently made TripAdvisor’s list of 14 Beautiful Little Beach Towns in the United States, and the town’s marketing committee hopes new aerial videos will help advertise that beauty to potential tourists.
Videos are becoming extremely important in destination marketing, said Shawn Braden, Wilmington and Beaches Convention and Visitors Bureau executive vice president of marketing.
“Some people are even thinking that photos are becoming obsolete, and that everything will be video driven,” she told the marketing committee during its Aug. 9 meeting.
The type of video Wrightsville Beach should use in its marketing is driven by how people are currently interacting with videos, she added. Three seconds, she said, is the average time that people pay attention to a video, so the island’s marketing videos should be short — 15 or 30 seconds — and they should include a call to action in the first few seconds.
Calls to action could direct people to the island’s tourism website, she said, or advertise a special online deal.
The town budgeted $2,500 of its marketing dollars for video in the 2015-16 fiscal year, Braden said, but she added, “I think we’ve gotten a lot for our money.”
They hired a photographer to fly a drone over the island, capturing aerial views of the ocean and the waterways while highlighting landmarks like the Heide Trask Drawbridge and Johnnie Mercer’s Pier. They’ll be able to capture still images from the video to use on the website or in future advertising campaigns.
They’re also creating “Go Local” videos in which Braden and her coworkers conduct on-camera interviews with local business owners. Those videos are meant to be authentic rather than flashy, she said, to give people a sense of both the local businesses and the people who work there.
The marketing committee members were pleased with the videos, saying that the aerial footage clearly differentiated Wrightsville Beach from the more congested beach towns like Myrtle Beach.
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