8 Essential Tips for Real Estate Video Marketing

Whether you’re a buyer, seller, or just a plain old real estate marketer, you know the importance of maintaining a strong, reputable, and attractive presence for your target audience. In such a competitive industry that hits so close to home (couldn’t resist), it is critical to market your business effectively and find ways to one-up your competitors.

If you have not hopped on the video bandwagon, then it is time to buck up and take the leap. Video has increased in popularity among marketers – and for good reason.

Real estate listings that utilize video marketing receive 403% more inquiries than those without video! Yet, if you are new to video, this can feel quite intimidating. As a past employee of a video hosting and marketing company, I understand this far too well. But I’m here to tell you that there is nothing to be afraid of! Video is not only a fun medium to work with; it is also one that can take your business to the next level. Here are eight tips that will help you sell more homes with video.

Tip #1: Set aside an appropriate budget

This first step towards video marketing success is ensuring you have quality videos. You may have been encouraged to just jump into video and not worry so much about production quality. While this might be true for certain instances (like sending video voicemails or other one-to-one interaction), for the real estate industry it is important that your marketing videos looked polished and perfected. It makes sense, right? This industry is all about aesthetics. If a property is not visually pleasing, then you are not going to have much luck getting it off the market.

Check out this video from Lifestyle Production Group. It really shows the value of investing in quality video production. From the drone footage to the B roll to the swanky music, this video really transports the viewer into a whole new world of luxury.

If you don’t have the budget for something this glamorous, don’t fret! There are ways to do video in-house professionally that won’t cost you an arm and leg. We’re lucky enough to live in a world where a lot of us carry around high quality video cameras in our pockets every day. For instance, check out this guide to filming professional looking videos on your iPhone!

It is also important not to forget that you need to set aside budget for promoting your videos on platforms like Google, Instagram, and Facebook, so keep this in mind when doling out your video cash.

Tip #2: Plan ahead

Video marketing is not just an off-the-cuff strategy to throw together and implement quickly. It takes time to plan the types of videos you want to create, how you’re going to film and edit your videos, where you’re going to place them, etc.

Before diving into video, take the time to strategize. Identify the videos you want and the videos you need. Figure out how to prioritize producing those videos. Develop a detailed plan for how to promote the videos.

The video production process itself can involve many steps, like finding actors, scripting, props, lighting, sound, or editing.

Don’t be overwhelmed, though! Planning will help all of these components come together in a reasonable time frame. Do some research, meet with your team, and make a plan to tackle your video goals head on. We’re confident you can do it!

Tip #3: Make your videos human!

Buying (or selling) a home is such a personal experience. Not only is the process financially significant, but it is also emotionally involved. And guess what? People often act with their emotions. People also relate to other people, not properties. This is why you need to get into the habit of storytelling.

Check out this video from Hurlingham to see what I mean.

Doesn’t that just give you all the feels? Don’t you just want to work with this real estate firm to buy the home of your dreams?

I’m not lying to you: Emotional appeal is by far the most effective strategy to win over your client’s heart. Go forward, and get those emotions rolling with powerful video!

Tip #4: Leverage the power of 360 video

When you’re selling something tangible online, it can be hard to represent the beauty of the physical product on a flat two-dimensional surface. Of course, this is where video is valuable for industries of this nature. Real estate is no exception, but since this industry needs to capture such a large, multi-functional spaces, standard video is often not enough.

This is where 360 video comes into play! This video experience allows your audience to become immersed and tour around the space without having to remove their slippers.

While diving into this somewhat new technology might seem intimidating at first, I’m confident you have the skills. Check out this guide on how to make a 360 real estate video to get started.

Tip #5: Sell the lifestyle and location, in addition to the property

Thinking beyond the apartment or home is critical for real estate marketers. It’s important to remember that you’re selling the location just as much as the features of the property. This shouldn’t be forgotten in your videos.

Check out this awesome example from The Skyvault.

Not only does this video sell the luxury of the building, but it also sells the big city lifestyle! With beautiful views of the New York skyline, this video sells a city rather than just an apartment.

Tip #6: Build trust with testimonials

Trust is a challenging component in this industry. Not only is the decision to purchase real estate a financially significant one, but it is also often a lifestyle choice that affects your everyday. The best way for real estate marketers to instill trust in their leads is by letting someone else do the talking. Happy homeowners are the “someone else” I’m referring to, because these are the folks who have already been through the process.

Hopefully in your company’s time in business there have been pleased clients who have worked with you. Reach out to these individuals to see if they’d be willing to film a quick video testimonial describing their positive experience. Getting this type of endorsement from a real person will help new leads see that your organization is one worth working with.

To ensure your happy clients will be willing to do this, make sure you treat them like royalty even after the deal is signed. Surprise them with a celebratory bottle of champagne or a gift card to a renowned restaurant in the area. If you do this, they won’t be able to refuse when you ask for them to star in a short video.

Tip #7: Place your videos strategically

Remarketing to your clients active in their buying process with an emotional client testimonial video could encourage them to go ahead and sign the contract on their new home with confidence.

If you’re running a campaign to promote brand recognition, though, it might not make sense to promote a video that features testimonials. Instead, these leads would probably benefit from a video that raises awareness about your location and services.

Placing your videos strategically is such an important part of the video marketing process because all of your effort creating and editing your beautiful videos will go to waste if you’re not reaching the right people.

Spend time planning your promotion strategy for each video to ensure you’re targeting the right audience with the right content at the ideal time.

Tip #8: Keep your videos under five minutes

To end with a simple tip, keep your videos short and sweet!

Every second your video plays viewers will be lost. This is just how viewing behavior goes: the average video only retains 37% of videos through the last second. As videos start to turn into movies, viewers are going to lose interest and move on. Your story is also likely to be more compelling if you only include the really engaging stuff.

At the end of day, if you’re able to master video marketing, your real estate firm is going to benefit. So, what are you waiting for? Go forth and film!

Website: https://marketingtool.co/

Ask an Expert: The Beginner’s Guide to Online Reputation Management

Your online presence, whether it be your personal social media, brand or website is shaped by your online reputation.

It’s how others see you.

Since feedback from customers or anyone with internet access can be freely entered into a variety of websites and social media platforms, your reputation is online and public like never before. Therefore, it is critical that you have a process for online reputation management (ORM).

In this article you will learn some simple steps to measure and manage your reputation online.

For many this topic is not well understood, and for others it may seem overwhelming. Keep reading and we’ll break it down into easy and actionable steps you can take to shore up your online reputation.

What is Your Online Reputation?

Whether you have an ecommerce website or are a public official such as a politician, your reputation is your most important attribute. Trust is important in any relationship and is directly related to your reputation.

BUILDING A POSITIVE ONLINE REPUTATION IS CRITICAL TO MAKING SALES, SINCE CUSTOMERS WILL ONLY BUY FROM SITES THEY TRUST.

Online reputation management refers to the process of generating, maintaining and promoting your company’s reputation. Customers use a wide variety of sources to form perceptions of a brand’s trustworthiness, including online reviews, social media accounts and posts, and the quality of the company’s website and content. Building a positive online reputation is critical to making sales, since customers will only buy from sites they trust.

Company Reputation Management

Depending on the size of your company, online reputation management can be as easy as answering a few Facebook messages each week, or as complex as organizing, evaluating and responding to thousands of emails, messages, calls, reviews, mentions, videos and more. We’ll focus on the online reputation management techniques that work best for small- and medium-sized businesses, since most ecommerce merchants fall within this category.

Managing Product Reviews

To start, put yourself into your customers’ shoes and think about how you shop online. If you’re on Amazon, chances are you look at the product reviews and the “Customer Questions and Answers” section to see what other people are saying about the product.

Would you buy a product that has mostly 1 star reviews? Probably not.

Check out this feedback for an anonymous movie we found on Amazon:

While some movies can be so terrible they receive cult status, this doesn’t appear to be the case here. One of the key components of maintaining a positive online reputation is ensuring that you’re offering a high-quality product — it’s much easier to get positive reviews and mentions if your product is noticeably better than the competition.

Managing Your Online Reputation within Google and Other Search Engines

Let’s say you’re looking for a coffee maker and are interested in Nespresso. The reviews are good on Amazon, and the price is higher than most others so before buying you want to do a little more research about the company.

So, you go to google and type in the brand name:

As you can see, besides organic links to the Nespresso website there is a Twitter feed from the brand as well as the company social media apps like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook pages. All of this information is critical to a brand’s online reputation. If you see negative results when Googling the name of your business or your business’ reviews, addressing these should become a top priority. Ideally, you’d like to solve the customer’s problem so effectively that they remove the negative review and replace it with a positive (or at least neutral) review. At the very least, you want to show anyone else reading the review that you’ve responded promptly, politely and have taken every reasonable step to resolve the issue.

Managing Your Reputation on Facebook

Facebook is a place where people can go to tell the world how much they love your product or company — or how much they hate them. Facebook has become one of the most popular ways for customers to reach out for support, and the last step for most unsatisfied customers is to leave negative reviews on Facebook and other platforms.

CUSTOMERS PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT YOU, BUT ALSO WHAT YOU’RE SAYING BACK.

Customers pay attention to what people are saying about you, but also what you’re saying back — if you’re responding to user issues quickly and effectively and displaying how much you care about customer satisfaction, you can not only mitigate the effects of the negative comment, but actually build brand trust. Customers love to see brands go the extra mile for customers, and great customer service is the best way to retain customers.

How to Respond to Negative Reviews?

The best way to respond to negative comments or reviews is with a helpful, positive response. In the examples above, the business was respectful and sensitive to the poor experiences that their customers faced, and took every reasonable step to resolve the issue and ensure the customer is happy.

This is how you should communicate, especially if you want to build a solid online reputation.

EVEN IF A CUSTOMER REVIEW IS GROSSLY MISINFORMED OR MISLEADING, YOU MUST APPROACH IT CALMLY AND PROFESSIONALLY.

The surest way to damage your reputation is to be rude and lack empathy with your customers, or to be defensive. Even if a customer review is grossly misinformed or misleading, you must approach it calmly, professionally and show that you understand the source of the customer’s unhappiness and display that you’ve done everything that you can to make it right.

If future readers see that a customer is still unhappy after you’ve bent over backwards to try to solve an issue, they’ll usually side with the voice of reason. Also, you may often find that giving the customer the benefit of the doubt can turn into a positive experience — they may be having a unique problem that helps you improve your product, or you may be misunderstanding the source of their dissatisfaction entirely.

Relationship with Customers

It’s not always just about the product. You may not see this right away, but your customer is thinking about the relationship with the brand.

In my business, Oransi, we sell air purifiers and replacement filters. When a customer buys one of our products they will need to purchase filters at some point in the future. If they have a bad experience with us and we don’t take care of them, how likely are they to buy the filters?

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT IS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT FOR RETAINING YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS THAN IT IS FOR ATTRACTING NEW ONES.

Online reputation management is even more important for retaining your existing customers than it is for attracting new ones. More accurately, ensuring that you provide a customer experience that is positive enough to ensure repeat customers is the best way to build an online reputation. If you never let them down, your customers can remain loyal for a lifetime.

How to Think About Your Online Reputation

To buy products 30 years ago, you went to the store or purchased from a catalog. There were no product reviews in the stores. There were no social media sites. You were mostly in the dark to how good a company was, and what others experienced. A small number of big brands dominated overall sales.

WITH TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES, NEW AND SMALL BRANDS CAN NOW COMPETE LIKE NEVER BEFORE.

With technology advances, new and small brands can now compete like never before based on the strength of their online reputations. Now, anyone can post feedback about your company, product or service for the world to see. They can give a shoutout on Twitter or influence your brand on Instagram to give it a positive boost.

This presents a huge opportunity for small businesses.

A key to success is leveraging your positive reputation and learning how to manage negative comments. But before we get to that, here are some tools to give you the insights to what is being said about your business:

Online Reputation Management Tools & Services

There are several tools and services that can make it much easier to manage and maintain your company’s online reputation.

• Google Alerts: One of the best reputation management tools is Google Alerts. Here you can enter your brand, product name or any keyword and choose how often you want Google to send you any mentions of your keyword. This is a great way to instantly know if someone has said something about you online, and can be key to finding and fixing negative reviews before they’ve been seen by thousands of potential customers.

• Feature Reviews Directly on Your Website: Collecting the bulk of product and customer review on your own website has a number of advantages. Customers have to navigate to your product pages to view them, increasing the likelihood of a sale. (If the reviews are good, of course!) We use the new Volusion V2 software as our ecommerce platform, which includes a Yotpo reviews plugin.
  • Other software programs for reviews include PowerReviews, Bazaarvoice and TrustPilot. Besides offering social proof, these programs can also help with your search engine optimization.
• Facebook Notifications: Review your Facebook Notifications regularly. Since Facebook owns Instagram, you can see all comments, messages and likes from both social sites for your company in one dashboard.
• Twitter Notifications: Similar to Facebook, you should review your notifications regularly and respond in a professional manner.Knowem allows you to search your brand across a host of additional social networks as well as the USPTO (US Patent and Trademark) site.
• If you sell on Amazon, then you’ll want to remember to review it for your products or for any new shopper questions or product reviews. Additionally, Amazon has a program called Vine where you can send your products to professional reviewers that are screened by Amazon to give your product some reviews. This is especially important if you are launching a new product and have few product reviews.

Protecting Your Brand Name

One of the most critical but commonly-overlooked forms of reputation management is copyright enforcement. To protect your brand you should have your brand name trademarked with the USPTO. Once you have the trademark there are some protections provided by Google in advertising and by Amazon for how your brand name is used on their platforms.

BE DILIGENT ABOUT ENFORCING YOUR COPYRIGHT.

Be diligent about enforcing your copyright — knockoffs and imitators can do serious damage to your brand reputation. Furthermore, you do not want them to use your brand name in online ads. It creates confusion with customers and could be a huge headache for you.

How can a negative online reputation affect you?

For any business a negative reputation can be costly, but for a for a smaller business it can be devastating.

If there’s just one bad review you can overcome it; however, you will need to work a little harder to sell and encourage your customers to write a review.

Think like a PR Company

Managing your online reputation is about projecting your positive image and taking care of customers. One way to think about it is to think like a PR company. Try to put out valuable content to shoppers and engage with them. If you can do this, you will build a brand community.

IN MOST CASES YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO WORK THROUGH NEGATIVE REVIEWS WITH SOME WORK.

If your reputation takes a hit, you should act quickly. In most cases you should be able to work through negative reviews with some work. If the negative publicity issues are too large, you may want to consider a reputation management company or a public relations firm. They can work on your behalf to manage reviews and online discussions with customers, put out press releases and other positive media and help you make sure that both your content and your interactions with customers are high-quality and effective.

Another strategy is to publish press releases. Smaller companies, however, will likely be better off engaging directly with their community on social media accounts rather than pursuing a press release.

The personal touch provided by interacting directly with someone highly familiar with the product (like the founders of the business) helps make customers feel valued and appreciated. However, avoid being overly personal — this is not your personal social media profile, so avoid posting anything that could ever hurt your brand reputation.

Being transparent and producing high-quality content is the way to go.

Positive Reputations Drive Sales

Reputation management isn’t all about avoiding a negative reputation.

Building your brand reputation gives you some of the best marketing opportunities available, such as testimonials, recommendations and positive mentions of your brand on blogs, social media or via face-to-face interactions.

If you have positive reviews, a strong reputation management strategy includes leveraging them in your marketing:

• Retweet glowing reviews and positive shoutouts
• Create graphics to show in your social media marketing programs, especially Facebook and Instagram
• Include testimonials on your homepage and product pages

At the end of the day, it’s trust that drives sales, so make sure to protect your most important asset — your company’s online reputation.

Have any questions about reputation management? Leave us a comment!

Source: volusion.com

Website: https://marketingtool.co

What’s Going to Be Big in Chatbots for 2019?

If you’ve been to any website recently, chances are you know what a chatbot is.

They’ve been taking the internet by storm, and marketing and sales departments can’t stop talking about them.

Slightly different than live chat — where a real human is behind the dialogue — chatbots work to simulate realistic conversations with website visitors in an effort to help them get what they need quicker and more accurately.

In 2018 alone, chatbots have evolved to be more intelligent and more human than ever before.

Because of their successful adoption by the end user, more and more bots are being incorporated with advanced artificial intelligence technologies, and 80% of businesses are planning to deploy some type of chatbot by 2020.

Now that we know that most audiences actually don’t mind talking to a robot rather than an actual person (in fact, 63% of people would consider messaging a bot to communicate with a company), it’s no surprise that the future of these platforms looks bright.

As we begin to round up 2018, an infographic by BotCore highlights some main items to expect beyond this year when it comes to using chatbots for our businesses.

Replacing Mobile Apps

According to Gartner, by the year 2021, 50% of enterprise companies will spend more on bots and chatbot creation than they will on traditional mobile app development.

As the app market becomes more saturated, it makes sense for larger organizations to focus on AI-powered workflows for their business strategy.

Enhanced Conversational User Experience

Also, by the year 2021, Gartner reports that “conversational AI-first” user experience, or CUX, will be adopted by most enterprise organizations.

CUX is a newer version of UX design, and it’s expected to gain more significance in the next few years. Examples of CUX include brand persona development, personalized content, and guided conversations. Its main purpose is to help the user reach their end goal as quickly as possible, all while delivering the best experience for them.

This is something to keep in mind as bigger companies begin to implement this strategy, as any organization that fails to keep up with CUX may risk falling behind in search rankings, relevance, and sales.

Mainstream Adoption and Moving Beyond Customer Service

According to Juniper Research, chatbots are expected to help cut business costs by $8 billion dollars by the year 2022!

It’s predicted that bots will begin to be used in more online spaces, such as CRMs, intranet, and IT helpdesks.

To view the full stats and the rest of the infographic, click here, or view it below.

Examples of Effective Chatbots

What’s most important to note here is that chatbots are not just for enterprise-sized companies, and any organizations that begin early adoption of this new technology are expected to see the biggest benefits.

With that said, here are a few chatbots you can explore to get started:

HubSpot’s Chatbot Builder

This HubSpot tool allows its users to create and customize their own bots without having to know any code.

Use it with HubSpot’s CRM to help manage your team’s contacts and leads, schedule meetings, and ultimately close sales.

Acuvate’s BotCore

Targeting enterprise organizations, BotCore has multiple bots designed for different business needs. These include SIA Bot, a sales intelligence assistant, MeshBOT, the world’s first chatbot for SharePoint Intranet, and IT Helpdesk Bot, which helps improve helpdesk response rates.

They also have bots that are empowered to help with Operations, HR, learning, development, legal, marketing administration, and other business needs.

Drift

Similar to HubSpot, Drift’s chatbot is essentially a personal assistant for your website. It can be used to answer your visitor’s questions, book meetings with someone on your team, and even qualify leads without a form.

For Sales & Marketing leaders, it’s definitely worth checking out.

 Source: impactbnd.com

website: https://marketingtool.co