Hi there, Brian Fitzgerald here with O’Rourke Hospitality Marketing. Today we’ll continue our conversation about vanity websites. In our last video, we talked about how vanity websites can give your property the ability to really demonstrate your uniqueness and really differentiate yourself from your competition. In today’s video, I want to talk about one of the core ways that you can actually do that, and that is through photography and video and other visuals.

So if we look at this example here from the Hilton Garden Inn Atlanta Downtown, we can see when you first come to the site, there are some smaller images. They don’t really fill up the full length of the screen or height of the screen. As you scroll through this page, there aren’t many more visuals.

There’s a lot of text, there’s a lot of bullet points, there are some icons, but all in all, there really isn’t much that is visually compelling about this page.

We think that photography is really the way to sell your property. That’s what consumers want to see. They want to be able to see the exterior of your building, so they know what to look for when they arrive. They want to see the bed that they’re going to be sleeping in and they want to see the bathroom to make sure that it’s clean.

Take this example and compare it to this next example where you immediately have a large image that fills almost the entire screen. Then as we scroll along the homepage, we’re introduced to more and more visuals, more and more imagery. That’s really helping to sell and differentiate this property. It’s giving the user all sorts of information about the overall property, the amenities, the different room types that exist.

Presentation of your imagery is a key thing. The other thing that a vanity site allows us to do is leverage other assets that you might have in this case. This property has some virtual tours and so the user can explore and look around the room. This is a really engaging and very useful utility for that end user. Who’s trying to make a decision about whether they want to stay at your property or another property.

Then the last thing that a vanity site can allow for is the use of video. If your property has some video assets then you can leverage it by having that video right on the homepage, playing, as soon as the user gets there. This can be a really compelling way to capture their attention and really show off what makes your property special by having it play right on the homepage, then user doesn’t have to click or look around for it. It’s introduced to them right when they load the page.

Hopefully you found these few examples helpful. We’re going to continue our series here about vanity websites, and today was about how to use vanity sites to showcase your photography and video assets in a more engaging way. So check back again soon as we’ll continue the series. If you’re thinking about a vanity website for your hotel, please get in touch with us today.