Real Estate Video Marketing – What You Need to Be Doing Right Now

iHomefinder - Video Marketing Blog Header - 20170324Personalization is a key element of communication between real estate professionals and potential homebuyers. While there are several ways to accomplish this, one of the most effective is to add video to your marketing efforts.

Video can be a very powerful medium that builds a story that homebuyers can relate to. It puts a face on the agency, so their initial interactions begin by getting to know you on a more personal level.

Of course, not all videos are created equal, and simply uploading countless videos to YouTube without a plan will not be very effective. These videos need to have a specific purpose or they won’t have the necessary impact on your clients.

Here’s what you need to be doing right now to make the most of your real estate video marketing.

Embrace Video Marketing as a Necessity

More and more homebuyers are turning to online video in their path toward purchase. It’s a great tool for house hunting, and these statistics seem to support the idea that both buyers and sellers are getting a lot out of them:

  • 85% of buyers and sellers prefer to work with agents who use video marketing
    • And yet, only 15% of agents are actually using video (i.e. there’s a huge opportunity here for you)
  • Properties listed with a video can generate 4x the number of leads
  • 80% of viewers remember what they’ve seen in online videos
  • Videos in emails double clickthrough rates and reduce opt-outs by 75%

Create Videos about the Community

86% of homebuyers use video to research a community. This is a good thing for you because a single community highlight videos can be used over and over again. It’s going to stay relevant for a long time because there probably won’t be that many big changes over the years.

Create Videos that Showcase the Inside of the Home

The second most popular use for video in the home buying process is the “virtual tour.” The study linked above also claimed that 70% of homebuyers use video to see what the home interior looks like. It will require a little more time to make videos for your listings, but the results can be worth it.

Supercharge Your Emails

Videos are particularly useful in prospecting emails. Most of us have learned to disregard unknown emails in our inboxes, but if there is something impressive or eye catching in the body of the content, you can stop them before they hit the delete button.

Including a video in your email will show your clients exactly who they will be working with. This creates a certain sense of human-to-human connection that you just can’t get with plain text.

Reach Clients through Facebook Video

Creating videos to market your agency or brokerage is great. The ability to target your ideal audience with those videos is even better.

People are already watching more than 100 million hours of video on Facebook every day. There is a huge opportunity here for you to show your videos to an interested audience.

Right now, Facebook video ads are some of the most cost-effective forms of online advertising, going as low as a penny per view.

Tips for Creating Facebook Video Ads

  1. Frontload the ad – You’ve got roughly 3 seconds to engage a viewer. Make sure the important information shows first.
  2. Be visually appealing – Most videos on social media start playing silently. Your presentation should be able to entice them with the visuals alone.
  3. Optimize your ads with Facebook tools – Facebook offers a range of targeting options to make sure you’re delivering the ad to the right audience.
  4. Always test, never assume – You can guess what your audience will like, but that will never be as effective as actually testing your ads to see which preforms better.

Expand Your Social Media Reach

While there are several ways to promote your listings on Facebook, video has become extremely important.

In 2015, Facebook updated its algorithm to prioritize posts from friends over posts from business pages, which very suddenly and harshly hobbled a lot businesses on the network. Video can turn that around. In one study, it was discovered that native video (i.e., video uploaded directly to Facebook and not just linked to) could double organic reach.

And, the best part about this method is that people are 12x more likely to share video than text, links, or photos.

Anyone Can Do Video Marketing

Video marketing will continue to gain prominence in the real estate industry, and the sooner you get started, the sooner you will see results.

While it is easy to tell yourself that you don’t have the experience or the equipment to get started, the simple fact is that anyone can do this. Your personality and openness is more important that the ability to get lighting exactly right.

It really does just require some basic equipment and some software (much of which is available for free) to introduce yourself in video form or to turn a number of high-quality images of a home into an attractive video.

There’s a lot of options out there. Let your creative side show and find out how you can connect with a whole new audience.

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