Colony Museum to be focus of new tourism video
The Germantown Colony Museum will be the focus of a new online video campaign through the Webster Parish Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB). The video is expected to debut near the beginning of the new year. Similar video campaigns through the Bureau have garnered thousands of views from Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi.
The Bureau’s director, Serena Gray is spearheading the project because of the past success of the promotional videos.
“Since starting in the CVB back in June, our Facebook likes have gone up a little over 400 in organic likes, not likes that I’ve paid to target an audience to get them to follow our page.
I’m looking to increase that even more,” Gray said of the success of the videos.
Gray is taking footage of the museum along with interviews with members of the Friends of the Germantown Colony Museum to create a narrative.
“We put one out for Germantown back in early July and it did ok but I wanted to bring more attention to the museum itself and the history behind the German settlers. I think if we start focusing more on the people that came in and start telling their stories then people are going to be a little more inclined to check out the museum because people like hearing about people,” Gray said.
Gray says the videos are the first step in getting people to know about the museum and what it has to offer. The video will also be featured on the update of the CVB website.
“We’re in the middle of the redesign of the website as well so it’d be a really great feature to launch with the kickoff of the website and the mobile app that’s also coming,” Gray said,
“There’s definitely going to be more intentional videos coming out of Webster Tourism to give people an in-depth look at what we have to offer and all of those videos will be on our YouTube channel, on our Facebook page, and they’ll also be linked to the products and tourism industry businesses that they’re connected to.”
More videos will be coming for the Parish. Gray is set to attend a Leadership Academy through the Louisiana Travel Association. At this event, she plans to find out what is trending and apply it to bring attention to Webster Parish.
Gray suggests to families with relatives coming to visit for the holidays to go out and visit the museum.
“What I’ve learned about the settlers and how communal they were and how giving they were and the priorities that they had when it came to family life, I still see a lot of that in today for Minden. It’s almost as if they kind of set the standard and it’s pretty impressive to see its carried on decades later,” Gray said, “I’m hoping that people can find a connection to how they live their life now and recognize that the early settlers weren’t as different as we think they were. They had a lot of the same family values and they cared about the community. All of that is still true today.”
The Germantown Colony Museum is open Thursday through Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm and entry is free. You can watch for the release of this video and view others at Facebook.com/websterparishtourism.