Marketing has gone digital for the past two decades. But real estate is still one of the few industries which rely on mass media marketing and spend immensely on running their marketing campaigns. In this article, we will explain 7 reasons to use video marketing for your real estate company.
Videos are important assets in helping your business expand its digital footprint.
Your brand is likely to flourish if you adapt videos as a part of your marketing. The ones who don’t are sure to stay behind in the race.
So here are some reasons why we think video marketing is an integral part of a real estate company.
The video version of the blog is below,
1. Stay ahead in the digital world
The world has changed a lot after the digital explosion. Until the turn of the last century, TV commercials were the de facto medium for brands to get maximum exposure. But the cost associated with ideating, producing, and launching TV ads were so costly that only the big brands with huge advertising budgets were able to do it.
It was effective but expensive. And your target audience may watch your commercials only when it is broadcasted.
But things have changed now. You can have your own channel on YouTube and users can access your stories anytime. The sudden spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation. It has led many businesses around the world to create a digital-first brand strategy, and videos are an integral part of that digital approach.
We all review a product first through videos even before looking at the specifications or feature details, which are more important from the utility point of view. The widespread popularity of smartphones and easy access to mobile data has made it possible for each and every consumer to watch videos about almost anything that they can think about.
When was the last time you ordered something online without exploring the product through videos or photographs?
2. Reach your target audience easily
If you expect each of your prospects to visit your property in-person based on your mass media ads, only a very few might show up, or worse, no one will. You are essentially investing in a questionable marketing channel that offers zero or negative returns on investment.
Now, you have to do things differently altogether.
Why not show them the property through something that sits on your prospects’ pockets all the time – their smartphone?
Smartphones are where your target audience spends most of their time. And with it, they have the liberty to choose what they want to do. When you do it right, there’s a better chance of making your prospects visit your property.
And that is exactly what you want. Right?
With the right video marketing strategy, you can reach the right people, and unlike mass media advertising, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to market to people who are not willing to buy homes at all.
3. Better control over your ad
You don’t have much control over your mass media advertising.
In digital, it’s just the opposite. You decide who sees your video ads, you get the exact number of the impressions, reach, and engagement your ads get. You can also control the channels to advertise your ads and the action you expect your prospects to take.
This is only the surface-level differences between mass media marketing and digital marketing. But just this surface-level difference can give you a glimpse of how powerful digital videos can be in your marketing strategy.
4. Nurture your potential customers
To make your potential customers buy your product, you have to nurture them by providing values upfront. Share the values you stand for, and the ways by which you will change their lives. This is the easiest way to nurture your leads to become customers.
But the best results often come from a few strong campaigns than a dozen campaigns where you pump money into. The campaigns that lack such nurturing ideas will always result in negligible results.
Nobody will buy your property just by seeing your ads. You have to create trust through your marketing content. Buying happens later, almost automatically. Even if you have met some success purely through your ad campaigns without building your brand, it is going to be an uphill task to scale up your marketing.
If you are not selling an FMCG product, don’t behave like one.
A slide study on recent marketing in the Real Estate industry.
Above study is influenced by David Meerman Scott’s book and the article in particular – Why B2B Marketing ROI Measures Lead To Failure
5. Cost-efficient
Even when the dotcom boom happened in the late 90s, nobody thought videos will become popular to this extent. People think that video making is only for big brands with a heavy ad budget, a certain part of it is still true.
But a lot of affordable options have emerged, and anybody can choose to create videos that will work for them. Videos are the predominant content form on the Internet today, and for the years to come.
If you look at the potential of videos shared by the industry veterans and marketers, it is surprising.
6. Build your brand while generating sales
I recommend a hybrid model, one which takes care of building the brand and while making the sales process a little easier.
Marketing’s job is to make sales effortless. Branding’s job is to make both marketing and sales effortless. The trick though is branding needs long-term strategic orientation when compared to revenue-based marketing.
Brand Management is more like practising yoga consistently. The results are not immediate, but it has a lasting impact on our brand. As a marketer, how much time do we allocate for an activity that doesn’t yield immediate results but has a long-term impact?
Branding is definitely an imperative of the Top management and requires CEO level support.
7. Create effective content
A smart marketer always puts more effort to convince the CEO to build the brand. The CEO tries to strike a fantastic balance between both branding and revenue marketing.
Both are important, building the brand alone may compromise on sales. Concentrating on sales alone is a one-way process; the moment you stop marketing you are done and dusted. Whereas a company with good branding can make sales easily with little or no efforts on the marketing front.
The hybrid model covers both aspects of branding + revenue-based marketing.
- Create content for branding.
- Create content for revenue marketing.
Both contents are different: the first one creates brand awareness while the other touches the consideration stage and takes the prospects further to the closing stage of the funnel.
One can be pushed through paid ads and the other doesn’t have to. In fact, the latter is your digital asset, it will talk about your brand forever in this cluttered digital space.
This will be displayed on your owned channel like YouTube channel or any social media pages where we actively share content. Though technically it is not your platform, you are the one who controls the channel in terms of what is displayed. Most of the branding efforts happen here.
