From Hulu to YouTube, marketing approaches that worked: Travel Weekly

Hulu? Who Knew?

Leave it to the younger generation to find new ways to sell river cruises while traveling themselves — and to those with more experience to put new twists on tried-and-true ways.

For 29-year-old Dillon Guyer, owner of Guyer International Travel, a $2,000 investment in marketing on Hulu’s new advertising platform has brought in enough business to pay for trips from Athens to Istanbul and brought in more than 50 new customers. All it took was some “incredible footage” he filmed everywhere he traveled, from Florida to Virgin Voyages and on to Europe, and then posting it on Hulu.

Guyer took part in a program being beta-tested by Hulu that offers his video ads to their customers and bills him every time someone watches one. At last check, his first 30-second video had been seen by 20,000 potential new customers.

The whole effort took little time, Guyer said. He and a friend took the videos themselves, though he paid a professional to edit the footage. It took less than 20 minutes to upload them to the Hulu platform and choose the demographic groups he wanted to see them.

Since Christmas, he’s had about 50 customers call and make deposits on various trips, some of them to locations other than those shown in the videos.

Lainey Melnick, meanwhile, has been putting all her energy into building traffic on TikTok as well as Facebook and Instagram. With 17,000 followers, she posted a last-minute cruise deal from Atlas in Antarctica last week and in a day sold five cabins.

“I have a very good network of people around my age who are luxury-oriented, and my posts are high up in the search engines because they are so consistent,” said Melnick. “I do them myself; in a face-to-face world, I want it to be my face they see.”

Melnick’s videos “are a kind of a story that takes you from the beginning to the end,” sometimes running three hours — and garnering an average watch time of 25 minutes on YouTube.

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