Video is a fantastic marketing tool for sales and service businesses such as real estate. Video gets interest, which turns into enquiries and ultimately ensures you gain a steady flow of clients.
The benefits of using video to market properties to potential buyers or tenants are widely known. If you’re a real estate professional, there’s also a huge range of benefits to using short, impactful videos to market yourself, your agency and the services you offer.
Why use video to market your real estate services?
The answer is pretty simple. You have to win a homeowners’ property listing before you can sell or lease their properties. A well-crafted series of videos can help you to maximise your listings and, therefore your earning potential.
Here are the key benefits of using videos to promote your real estate brand;
1. Gaining a competitive edge
Real estate is a highly competitive game. Creating videos helps you to get some ‘one-on-one’ time with prospects ahead of your competition. It enables you to share your insights and answer frequently asked questions. Real estate agents or agencies who don’t use video to market themselves and their skills miss out on this opportunity.
2. You can always be at your best on video
There’s an old saying that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Impactful videos can help to ensure that you always make a great first impression with prospective clients.
Like any industry, in real estate, we often need to deliver the same message over and over to prospects. They ask the same questions, and depending on how well our day is going and how much energy we have at that moment in time, we may or may not answer their questions to the best of our abilities.
However, you can perfect your video answers and have your polished presentations circulating on the web, searchable in Google and showcased online 24/7, 365 days a year. You will also send a clear message to prospective clients that you are social media savvy, and we know how important social media campaigns can be in selling and leasing properties.
3. Videos personalise you
Nothing beats getting to meet someone, even digitally, and listening first-hand to the key knowledge they have to share. By using video, prospective clients can get to hear your voice, see your mannerisms, hear your advice and start to feel like they know, like and trust you … and they haven’t even met you yet!
Seeing your picture on a signboard is one thing, but seeing and hearing you speak is another. A series of short, impactful and informative videos can help you to introduce yourself and start building your credibility with prospective clients.
People who might not have come through your open homes or those who past clients refer your way can digitally meet you when you’re presenting your video messages, ahead of actually meeting you. Videos allow you to showcase your personality and knowledge in a very personable way.
4. Convenience
Using video is convenient both for you as a real estate professional as well as your prospective clients. Firstly, you can save time because you don’t need to drive to a client’s house and answer their most frequently asked questions in person.
Your prospective clients can view your videos at a time that suits them, no matter what time of the day or night that might be. They can also check you out and hear what you have to say without having to share who they are. Many people like anonymity when they are in ‘research mode’.
We have to remember that online marketing is designed to be the warm-up tool that preps a prospective client ahead of them wanting to talk with you about their specific situation and needs. When a real estate prospect contacts you after viewing one of your online videos, you have already passed the first warm-up hurdle.
5. Flexibility
Marketing your videos on social media provides you with flexibility. If you want to be seen by more locals, then you can simply increase your advertising budget.
For example, increasing your social media video advertising spend by just $30 a week (just over $4 a day, less than a cup of coffee) can increase your number of video views by 1,000 or more. That’s a very cost-effective promotion, especially when your videos are showing you at your best.
Best-practice real estate agent video tips
- Tip #1: Keep your videos to around a minute in length.
Some social media platforms will limit you to this length, or even if they don’t, it’s important to remember that people are generally scrolling social media for enjoyment or entertainment, so your audience there will often have a limited attention span.
- Tip #2: Ensure that a portion of your video topics are ‘evergreen’.
In other words, that you have a portion of your videos on topics that will always be relevant and where your recorded content won’t date. Evergreen videos won’t need to be reshot when conditions change, unlike videos on the current state of the property market. Evergreen videos can be rerun to capture new prospects as they enter the market over time.
- Tip #3: Prepare a script and rehearse before you record.
Even if you’re a natural speaker, it can be hard to speak off the cuff and nail all your key points in a minute or so without a script and some rehearsal.
- Tip #4: Use video captions to highlight your key points.
This makes it easier for people to watch your video with the sound off and also absorb your key information. If you add the transcript to your web page or social post, it’ll also help with SEO (search engine optimisation) to make your videos more discoverable online.
- Tip #5: Maximise the reach of your videos & analyse viewing metrics
You can do this by promoting them to your target audience on your social media channels and then analysing the reporting data to identify and follow up with potential prospects who are engaging with them.
Real estate FAQs: What topics should you talk about?
Use the most frequent questions that prospective clients ask you (or Google) as a guide for choosing your video topics. For example:
● The latest home sales trends in your agency’s geographic area
● How to maximise the appeal of your home
● How to set the selling price for your home
● What to look for when hiring a real estate agent
● The latest rental trends in your agency’s geographic area
● How to sell a tenanted property
● How to attract and retain top-quality tenants
● The benefits of using a property manager
● What to look for when hiring a property manager.
Your video content should demonstrate your local market knowledge and why prospective clients should use your services rather than those of your competitors.
Here’s an example of how Anthony Somlai of Home Property Agents demonstrates his credibility in the highly competitive Neutral Bay and Lower North Shore market.
Is it time-consuming to produce high-quality real estate videos?
It certainly can be if you do it yourself, but it doesn’t have to be. The risk, however, with taking the ‘DIY’ approach to creating your own videos is that it’s likely they won’t look professional.
Remember what we said about first impressions? There are no second chances.
It’s a better idea to use the services of a digital marketing professional to save you time and to help you deliver both cost-effective and high-quality videos.
How Hoole can help
Over the past five years, our digital marketing team at Hoole has perfected the process of creating highly effective social media videos for our real estate clients. We now offer a video marketing service that helps our clients prepare and deliver 10 one-minute videos to advertise themselves.
We take the time to get to know our clients and their micro-markets so that we can offer them all of the following video services:
● interesting video topics.
● engaging video scripts, including ‘intros’ and ‘outros’.
● professional video shoots, including the use of a teleprompter to make them as fun and easy as possible, as well as direction to help our clients both look and sound great when delivering their messages.
● video editing and captions.
● uploading and publishing our clients’ videos across all their important social media channels, as well as housing them on their websites.
● running ads that get our clients’ videos in front of people across their target suburbs.
● client reporting on how their videos are performing in terms of neighbourhood views.
Case study – Sarah Mairs, Wellington
Sarah Mairs from Ray White Wellington began by doing her own videos to promote herself, before engaging our team at Hoole to help her take them to the next level.
You can see the evolution of Sarah’s videos over time via her LinkedIn page, and her videos have now been viewed on social media by over 9,000 potential prospects in her local area for a minimal advertising spend.
Sarah Mairs, from Ray White Wellington, shares;
“As a real estate professional, I knew I needed to increase my visibility and get help with my own local area marketing. I felt that digital and social media marketing was so important, and I wanted to implement it more and more. I’m convinced it’s the way forward, and I really feel if you aren’t doing it, then you’re missing out on a golden opportunity.”
Get professional help
If you’re a real estate professional who’d like to use video advertising to pip your competitors to prospects, get in touch with me, Melanie Hoole. I’ll help you develop a series of videos that answer frequently asked questions and get you in front of the people you need to reach.
Written by Melanie Hoole
My team and I specialise in helping real estate and property professionals perfect their personal brand, build a first-class digital profile and implement inbound marketing activities to attract leads. If you are unsure which direction to take with your digital marketing contact me for help.
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