How to make people want to visit a place

The short version

Sell the trip, not the place. A viewer deciding whether to visit is asking three things: how far is it, what will I do there, and how will it feel. Answer those in that order and you have a video that gets sent to a friend.

Start with the distance

The Stillwater film opened with how close it is: less than an hour from Detroit. That single line does more work than any beauty shot, because it moves the place from "somewhere nice" to "somewhere I could be on Saturday".

Measure the distance from where your audience lives, not from where the place is. Sixty percent of our audience is in Metro Detroit, so that is the starting point we used.

A structure you can reuse

1. The distance or drive time, in text, in the first three seconds.
2. The arrival, shot the way a visitor would see it.
3. Three things they will actually do there. Not amenities. Actions.
4. The pace of the place. Let a few shots run longer than feels comfortable.
5. People in the frame. An empty place looks closed.
6. The practical next step: how to book, when it is open, what it costs if you can say.

Film it for a phone with the sound off

The edit was vertical and made sense without audio. That is how most people met it, halfway through something else, and it is also how they forwarded it.

Make sure the audience can actually go

A destination video only works on people who can reach the destination. Reach that is local to the place is worth more than a bigger number from somewhere else. Stillwater gained more than 12,000 followers because the people watching could picture the drive.

Where people go wrong

1. Opening with the history of the business.
2. All drone, no ground. Aerials show where a place is, not what it is like to be there.
3. No people.
4. Forgetting to say how to get there or how to book.