Over the past 18 months, the Visit Durango team has been intrigued and excited by a quickly expanding trend: Short video content outperforms still photography and text-based content time and time again.

This shouldn’t come as a shock considering the breakthrough of social media platforms like TikTok taking over the marketing world and other platforms expanding their “story” features.

Video content is defined as videos published to your website, social media platforms, other websites and ad platforms such as Google Ads.

We would like to share some findings and advice about what we’re seeing for video content and why you should adopt short-form video into your marketing strategy.

To start, Visit Durango uses these platforms to share videos we produce: Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google Ads, our website and media publications and partners’ websites. Using these profiles, we produced and published extensive curated content.

Here are some interesting findings of our video content compared to photo-only and/or text-only content since September 1, 2019:

Because consumers (including visitors and locals) are spending more and more time watching video content, digital platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and a whole host of others are preferring short-form video in their algorithms. This translates to platforms “pushing up” video content over other types of content.

With video marketing and video content increasing in popularity, it’s only a matter of time before video-based content is the standard.

Because of this trend, Visit Durango has prioritized our marketing strategy to incorporate video content and use it to showcase Durango during the off-peak seasons.

However, we recommend performing your own research and tests before diving into the video world head-first.

Fortunately, diving into the world of video is easier and cheaper than ever – especially when promoting a small business in Durango to incoming visitors and locals. You don’t need to have James Cameron on your team to produce quality short-form video content.

Consumer video technology and software like Apple’s iMovie, Adobe Premiere Rush, Adobe Spark and Canva are making video editing easier than ever. Not to mention that most smartphones now shoot 4K-resolution videos. And even the expensive, pro-consumer video equipment is more within reach than it was even five years ago.

It is worth mentioning that gear doesn’t necessarily mean your videos are going to be semiprofessional overnight. It takes practice to master the art of videography, but having gear (similar to buying a new mountain bike) is a great incentive to go out and practice shooting as much as possible.

Regardless of your gear set-up, video can increase the performance of your content, no matter what you’re selling. While Visit Durango is just one type of industry among many, video-based content is an effective way to increase your reach, engagement and subsequent sales.

How many videos you do and how diligently you produce and promote video content is clearly up to you and what works best for your business.

Nick Kogos is marketing manager at Visit Durango. He can be reached at nick@durango.org.