There are many industries which started leveraging video marketing – the latest in the marketing arsenal.
To say that video is the future of marketing would be an utter understatement.
Video marketing is hip, hot, and happening right this very moment.
Using videos to market brands is a future that we are already living in.
We live in the digital world where 55% of people watch online videos every day. Videos also get 1200% more shares than content with texts or images—combined.
If you need more convincing, consider your own content consumption habit.
If you’re like the most people, you landed here after watching some videos on your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn feed.
I’m sure you come across a lot of video content wherever you spend your time online. (Actually, you don’t have to go that far. We ourselves have included a few of our videos in this article.)
You can’t escape the videos’ omnipresence in the online world—especially in social channels. Social media algorithms favour videos since they are the ones that drive user engagement.
There’s no denying that video supersedes blogs and infographics as the #1 form of content in marketing across all industries.
But here’s the truth. All the above stats are from the U.S. They don’t represent the video consumption behaviour of India.
After all, India is home to over 232 million internet users with a huge thirst for video content.
Videos Get Most Screen Time in India
As you’d expect, the video consumption habits in India supersedes the rest of the world.
Take a look at these latest stats from the Vuclip, a media-tech company:
- The mobile network usage in India is 65%, as compared to 49% across most Asian nations.
- 85% of viewers prefer to watch short-form video content on their smartphones.
- Most people in India view 56% of video content while they are travelling.
- 40% of Indians pay for online videos on iTunes and YouTube as compared to 29% in other neighbouring countries.
- 60% of Indian viewers love watching funny videos online.
What might have led people in India to love video so much?
There are three factors that have helped video as the most preferred content among Indians.
- The massive spread of the Internet across the country in the last few years.
- The popularity of smartphones as an easy and affordable medium of entertainment.
- Access to mobile data is relatively easy in India, compared to the rest of the developing world.
And this is just the beginning. With the launch of 5G network in India towards the end of 2020 or early 2021, the number of people going online and viewing video is going to skyrocket further.
All this to say that there’s a huge opportunity waiting for real estate businesses in India to adopt video in your marketing.
In the next section, let us see how you can use videos in your marketing plan to grow your business.
Homebuyers ❤️ Videos
You must have heard that real estate listings with videos get 403% more inquiries than the ones that don’t.
I believe that number is much higher since that stat is from 2014.
And I have very strong reasons to say that. Let us see some more recent stats below:
- 51% of people say YouTube is their top research site when shopping for a home
- 60% of homebuyers say they prefer video over any other format for receiving online information.
- 40% of homebuyers love having virtual video tours when they are shopping for real estate properties.
- People who view real estate listings with videos are 174% more likely to buy the property than the ones who don’t watch it.
And if you are thinking of new ways to market your real estate business, you should include video as an integral part of your go-to-market strategy.
Below are some of the biggest advantages that you will get when you incorporate video marketing into your plan.
1. Improve your online visibility
In the online marketing world, visibility is everything.
The most powerful people in the world today are not businessmen, politicians, product developers, or marketers.
The most influential people of our generation are people who build algorithms for the online world or those who can use them to their advantage.
That’s the reason why Google is the biggest disrupter in the online marketing world.
Every marketer wants to know how to get Google’s algorithms to favour their ranking or to be found more frequently by their audience.
And videos offer some sort of a cheat code for you to do that.
That’s because of search engines like Google love videos. Just look at the research stats which show that adding videos on your website increases your chances of ranking on Google’s first page by 53%.
In fact, Brian Dean from Backlinko makes a point that Google favours pages with YouTube videos because it owns the video platform.
And if something ranks in Google, you are in the direct line of sight of your target audience.
But it’s not just Google that favours videos.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram also rank video content higher than others because that’s what drives them more engagement in their ecosystem.
It doesn’t matter when you market your properties online—Google, Bing, Facebook, paid ads, or any third-party property listing website. Videos can help your customers discover your online listings more frequently.
2. Make your listings standout
Real estate marketers in India are not making the most of the research that points to the mounting evidence of data that says—Indian consumers love videos.
Take a close look at any of the real estate search portals in India such as Magic Bricks, 99acres, Housing.com, and so on.
Except for a handful of listings, most properties listed in these websites don’t have videos that showcase the properties.
Real estate businesses know that homebuyers are visual shoppers. That’s why most listings include a photo gallery of the property, its floor plan diagram, location map, and so on.
Sometimes, these listings include pictures of nearby landmarks such as a train station, a zoo, or a mall.
And if a property is still under construction, the builders will have a colour sketch of the property included in the listing.
Heck, many listings you see include even the bank logos that finance house loans.
But for some mysterious reason, they don’t add videos to the listing.
In addition to the SEO advantage we discussed earlier, videos are also great at improving your page’s engagement.
That’s because videos make your listings stand out from the mediocre ones that don’t include rich visuals.
And you should definitely leverage videos for a competitive advantage given the fact that most other property sellers are unaware of the benefits of adding videos to their listings.
There’s a myth that videos are not as effective as text or image content when it comes to page loading speed, cross-channel compatibility, or running ads.
But these claims are exactly what I said they are—myths.
There are several factors that affect your page loading time, such as how many elements you have on your page, how your website is optimized, and how you embed your videos on the page.
If all these factors are aligned, videos don’t pose any challenge to your website’s speed performance.
If it were the case, search engines would not prefer videos as a ranking signal on their platforms.
Videos are also hot for cross-channel, cross-device consumption. If you remember the stats above, it’s clear that most people view videos on-the-go and in their smartphones.
And there isn’t any restriction where you can add videos online. You can push them wherever you publish your text or image content—emails, social media, ad platforms.
Here’s the best argument I kept for last—at 1.84%, video ads offer the highest click-through rates (CTR) of all digital ad formats.
When you add videos to your email marketing strategy, they improve your email open rates by 96%.
That’s not all though. Combining the power of videos in your marketing email trickles down that open rate into a CTR of 65%.
3. Offer immersive experience
For most families, buying a house is a complicated emotional decision.
Homebuyers take their sweet time to identify the best neighbourhoods, shortlist homes, and visit the properties before they make a booking.
Your job as a real estate marketer is to help them simplify their decision-making. You have to sell them the benefits of owning a home.
You have to understand their motivation behind buying a home and offer them the right solution.
- Most people buy a house to have a roof over their family’s head.
- A lot of them buy property to secure their financial future.
- Some families buy a home for a luxurious lifestyle.
While different people have different reasons to buy a house, their decisions are almost always emotional.
And nothing evokes emotions in people better than a well-made video.
You can create a video to market opulence to the people who want to buy a luxurious home.
You can make a video to sell safety and security to other families that want a home for a stable future.
Unlike text and image content, videos offer an immense room for creativity. With videos, you can paint the picture of the world your buyers want to live in.
Imagine an engaging video that showcases your property from a bird’s eye view. Or a video that gives people a detailed 360° view of the estate.
Here’s a simple cue for the kind of script that you can build on:
The couple in the video is standing on their balcony of her 25th-floor apartment overlooking the vista of a morning cityscape.
The wife—your video actress—is sipping her coffee while the wind blows her hair all over the face.
Then the visuals switch to show the posh amenities of the properties such as the infinity swimming pool, a swanky gym, a children’s park.
Show them the visual of a happy family celebrating their kid’s birth in the spacious and plush banquet hall.
Add soothing music with a voiceover narration to the panning visual of a 60-acres of property rich with lush greenery.
Actually, the best videos don’t even need to be written or spoken words to convey the emotions you want your audience to feel.
Take a look at this video, for example, Interior film for WeBe Design Lab by Studio Navans
I will be very honest here. I write words for a living and I will be the first one to say all the blogs in the world can’t match the emotion a visually-rich video can evoke in the hearts of your prospective homebuyers.
Right now, virtual video tours and drone videos are high in demand. It’s videos like these that homebuyers prefer to watch before they even decide to visit the property in person.
Videos are powerful because they are the most genuine form of media. Videos can help you hype certain aspects of your story, but you can’t entirely fake things over video.
Videos show things for what they are; they keep things real. Video content is the reflection of the reality you want to present.
With videos, you can give them the narrative they want to hear. Videos also allow you to communicate the right kind of positioning for your real estate brand.
Until virtual reality (VR) becomes mainstream, videos are the best option for real estate businesses to offer an immersive marketing experience.
4. Getting started is easy
Perhaps the most confusing part about including video into your marketing strategy is this—it’s difficult to realize how easy it is to get started with videos.
Most real estate businesses pour a ton of money in buying glossy, first-page newspaper spaces, putting up a hoarding board in major city locations, and running commercials in prime time TV.
And more often than not, it’s tough to attribute the return on interest (ROI) of most of these marketing campaigns because they follow a spray-and-pray approach.
Meanwhile, creating a solid video to market your properties will only cost you a fraction of your marketing budget.
And because it lives in the online space, you can track the performance and success of a marketing video to the T.
In fact, you can add a call-to-action (CTA) button to your video in order to encourage visitors to take the desired action.
The best part is—with videos on your side, you can kiss the expensive marketing agency goodbye who cost you an arm and a leg for an ephemeral newspaper ad.
You can actually shoot your own selfie-style videos with just an iPhone and a collar mic to showcase your properties.
It’s a great idea for recording vlogs or coming up with other social media engagement content.
But for recording more professional, conversion-level marketing videos, you should aim to play at a higher level than that.
Selling real estate property is a high-end business; you shouldn’t trivialize your brand’s reputation with amateur videos.
Hiring a video marketing team is very different from hiring a full-scale marketing agency.
It’s a much simpler process to sign up a partnership video marketing studio. For starters, you know exactly what outcome to expect from the partnership, i.e., videos.
You also don’t have to negotiate on pricing since you pay only for the video plans that you are going to choose. There are no additional charges on top of the plan that you choose.
Professional video marketers know the ins and outs of taking 360° videos of your property to make sure nothing gets left out in your promotion.
Hiring a team of expert video marketers is not just time- and cost-effective for your brand, but it’s also a scalable way to sustain your marketing efforts for the long haul.
Real estate businesses are never done with marketing just one or two of their properties. You need to come up with new marketing ideas and keep making new videos for every new property your business owns.
Maintaining a long-term partnership with one video marketing agency will help you get your videos out on time and push them across all promotional channels.
And oh, video marketing offers the biggest ROI of all. Using videos to market your properties result in an 80% increase in:
- Website traffic
- Lead generation
- Booking inquiries
- Sales conversions
From a purely business angle, those are some huge returns for a small amount of investment.
There’s a famous quote in the real estate circle that goes, “Don’t wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate and wait.”
It’s the same with choosing video marketing for your real estate business. If you wait too long, it’s an opportunity cost that you incur by being indecisive.
Turning the Spotlight on You
Buying a house is a life-changing, and often a once-in-a-lifetime decision for most homebuyers. As a real estate marketer, you have to understand the psychology of your homebuyers and play to the tune of their sentiments.
And nothing but good videos can help you reach your right audience in the crowded online world and pique their curiosity in your properties.
Now that I have shown you the undeniable power of videos to drive engagement and improve conversions, it’s up to you to decide whether:
- You want to keep doing the run-of-the-mill marketing activities that others in your niche are doing, or
- You want to start using videos to make your marketing stand out from the herd
