I absolutely love what Pat’s Peak rolled out last season.

They called it “A Day in the Life” and, in my book, it’s one of the best (if not THE best) resort video series I’ve ever seen.

Let’s start with the trailer.

Simple story introducing the series, setting an expectation of regular, themed content.

Here are a few examples of the content they delivered.

 
It’s a home run on a number of levels.

#1) It’s a series.
I’m a huge believer in delivering not just content, but content in a series for one simple reason: momentum. Each piece of content can build on itself to build a larger and larger following as you go.

I didn’t follow this series in realtime, but this would be a perfect thing to showcase high on the resort website with an opt-in form to be alerted of future episodes.

#2) It’s behind the scenes.
People love this stuff. We love to learn how things work, lift up the hood, and get a peek at all the moving pieces that go into something we usually take for granted. Ski resorts hold an even more romantic place at the corner of a sport we’re passionate about and the love of entrepreneurial stories.

#3) It’s evergreen.
The content Pats now has in their arsenal can be reused over and over again. Big night of snowmaking? Share the snowmaking video with the news. Groomers are perfect? Tell your skiers and link to the video to show how it was done.

The beauty of evergreen content is that it justifies a bit more expense in creating it because the shelf-life is often indefinite.

#4) It’s solid video.
This is really good video. It’s not overdone with dolly and drone shots, it’s quality footage that’s edited together cleanly and in a way that holds your interest.

#5) It’s really good audio.
But even more, the audio is awesome. This is something some many people overlook, but audio can make or break a video. A lav mic is a small price to pay for drastically increasing the quality of a video.

One Last Thing
Perhaps most of all I love that this series could be completely planned in advance and lasted the entire season.

Every week Pats’ marketing team had a clear direction for the content they needed to gather and the story they wanted to tell.

Far too often these awesome stories aren’t told because in the rush of the season the knee-jerk, default images and updates are shared when a better idea fails to quickly surface.

Great work to all involved. Well thought out and well executed content.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.