Photos Are Not Enough – Why You Need Real Estate Video Content
If you haven’t heard yet, video marketing is becoming an integral part of marketing real estate properties. In fact, whether you’re a real estate agent in Naples, Marco Island, Bonita Springs or anywhere else in Southwest Florida, if you aren’t using video content, your competition is leaving you behind, plain and simple.
Having photos of the property taken by a professional real estate photographer is a great start, and adding compelling copy along with the images can help give your potential buyers a bit more of a feel to the property. But in order for them to really make an emotional connection to the home, you need to consider using professionally shot and edited video content in your marketing as well.
Why? Here are some numbers from Business 2 Community:
- Including a video on your homepage can increase conversion rates by 20%
- Adding video to an email increases the click-through rate by 200 to 300%
- Adding video to a landing page can increase conversion by 80%
- Video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines
- Videos generate more than 1,200% more social shares than text and image posts
As you can see, there is plenty of incentive to include video with most of your marketing content. If you’re worried that adding video content will be too much of a hassle for you, well, this just isn’t the case.
Adding Video Content is Easy
You might be wary of video because of how much extra time you think you’ll have to invest to include it in your various marketing efforts. But guess what? It’s really not that difficult or time-consuming at all.
Adding video might even take you as little as a few minutes. If you’ve already hired a professional photographer to take photos of your property (read my post on how to choose the right photographer in Naples), you can also ask them to take video as well. This way, there’s actually no extra work for you to do at all.
Your real estate photographer will provide you with polished, edited high-quality video content you can use right away. All you’ll need to do is drop it into your email, website, landing page, or simply share it on social media.
Actually, you know what? Do all of the above.
Help Your Potential Clients Get a Feel for the Property
As I mentioned above, buying a home is an incredibly emotionally-charged experience. Just like buying a car, homeowners will often be pushed to purchase a home based on how it makes them feel once they are inside. Your job is to make it feel like “home.”
Having a video walkthrough allows you to do this, or at least plant the seed, without the client having to actually set foot in the home. All they have to do is click the play button. Slideshows are a great start, but they won’t give your clients the “feel” aspect they crave. The images will only allow them to see the home.
But a video walkthrough allows them to get a much better grasp on the space. They will be able to hear boards creek under your footsteps, or a breeze pass through certain rooms. They’ll see how light passes through windows and get a better idea of just how big or small certain rooms are.
You can even add a voiceover so they can become more familiar with you, their future agent. You can also add music to help trigger their emotions, all of which helps them form a bigger connection to the property.
Get Your Clients More Familiar With You
Your potential home buyers are watching the video to get to know the property, but it’s also an opportunity for them to get to know you as well.
You can use video content to show your personality and impress viewers with your vast knowledge of the home. You can even drop tidbits about yourself throughout, including any accolades you may have earned during your career. Bragging rights, your voice, and seeing you on camera will go a long way toward helping a potential homeowner deciding to hire you as their agent.
Include a Clear Call to Action
Perhaps the most important aspect of your real estate marketing video content is the call to action. Tell your viewers what to do next! You can use a call to action to gain more visits to your website, follows and likes on your social media pages, and even to capture their contact information so you can get in touch about the property and get the ball rolling.
You can also ask your viewers to take a look at other listings, book an appointment to view the property, and much more. Viewers will actually be much more likely to take action if they are told to in a video than if they see the same message written on a page, but not spoken aloud. It helps to create a sense of urgency in your viewer, and soon enough, you might have viewings lined up from sunup to sundown!
Finding a Real Estate Photographer Who Does Video Content
As video content has become more and more popular, many real estate photographers have adapted and learned how to professionally capture a home via video as well as still images. This includes video walkthroughs of the property as well as aerial drone footage to show the exterior and lay of the land. Before you hire a photographer to take images of your property, make sure you ask them if they are capable of producing video content as well.
Looking for a professional real estate photographer in Southwest Florida? Jon Kreider at Sun Services SW has expertly photographed properties in the area since 2013. A commercial photographer serving the Naples, Marco Island, and Bonita Springs communities, Jon specializes in real estate photography and video, bringing homes to life online before they are viewed in person. Visit Jon’s website or shoot him an email today at jon@sunservicessw.com to discuss your real estate photography needs.