Marketing an Open House video
An open house video can provide an excellent return on investment when selling a property. The key to maximizing that return lies in how you market the video. The quality of production does matter but views and engagement by your target market is what really counts. It is surprisingly easy to do well but very few vendors get the most from their video. Here we show you why an open house video is so beneficial and how to market it effectively.
Why you should use an open house video to market your property
With the advent of social media and mobile technology, we can produce content at a rate unimaginable 15 years ago. From the resulting information overload, people have become desensitized to marketing. A photo or paragraph that would have been eye-catching and attention grabbing a decade ago now gets lost in a sea of similar information. We literally carry apps in our pockets capable of instantly turning out professional quality content.
The bar for what is considered exceptional has been raised considerably.
Video is the one medium that consistently catches people’s attention and delivers a call to action effectively. Video is dynamic. It allows you to engage buyers’ senses in a way that still images and print simply can’t.
It allows you to give buyers a huge amount of information very quickly. Consider the amount of images or words that would be required to deliver a comparable amount of information as a 5 minute video. A buyer will watch a short video without thinking twice about the time involved but won’t be so eager to look through 100 photos or read 3000 words.
A video also allows you to bring your property to life. Still photos will never do justice to a property, showing discrete snapshots of individual rooms. A video lets you show how the spaces flow into each other, how well a layout works and where the rooms are in relation to each other. Each feature of the property can be highlighted and described by the realtor/narrator, drawing attention to its unique selling points. This can be done with still images and written descriptions, but it feels disconnected and as a result the message is not as powerful as could be.
An open home video can also show the neighborhood in detail. The sights, sounds and general vibe communicated through a video gives the buyer a real feel for what the neighborhood is like. This can often be what makes a sale. The area a property is located adds more value to it than the quality of its build. The only way to effectively show what can be the property’s biggest asset is through video.
How to market your open home video
The objective of an open house video is to convert views into sales. It needs to be seen by the right people at the right time. There are a couple of main ways to achieve this.
Real Estate Listing Websites
The most direct route is to go straight to your target market. Real estate listing websites, particularly well established ones such as Zillow, allow you to put your property in front of millions of buyers.
The main downside to these sites is that there are a lot of properties listed and hence, a lot of competition. It can be very hard to make your property stand out. Everyone has access to a camera phone or digital camera now. Every listing will have a lot of pictures. While the availability of technology means a lot of content, particularly images, can be created, the standard of quality of this content is, in fact, very poor. What was once a professional’s job is now done mostly by amateurs.
This is where a well made open house video proves its worth. A video is very eyecatching and makes your property stand out. It gives the buyer everything they need to know in a short, concise and informative format. It immediately begins selling your property rather than just giving out information.
Real estate websites are an excellent method for engaging with active buyers. However, an open house video can be used to reach an even greater audience in your target market.
Social Media
Social media is one of the most best channels to use to market your property and one that is ideally suited to video. The vast majority of your target market has some kind of social media presence and an open house video allows you to leverage that.
By far the best platform to use to market your open house video is YouTube. YouTube is all about the visual. It allows you to reach an almost unlimited amount of people. It has an unparalleled sharing function, allowing a video to be shared on over a dozen other platforms like Facebook, Blogger and Pinterest. It can also be embedded in other websites and blogs and emailed very easily.
Facebook, while more general in its focus, has an enormous reach that can allows you to market your video to an extremely varied audience. There are over one billion Facebook accounts, accessing every country on the planet. For more targeted promotion, sponsored Facebook posts are a cost effective way to get your video in front of potential buyers. Facebook also lends itself well to organic promotion. The ease of sharing, tagging etc. allows users to direct others they feel might be interested in your video to it with just a click. They begin to do your targeted marketing for you.
Instagram is another visual media focused platform that is ideal for marketing your video. It can be restricting with the length of video allowed but Instagram has seen a massive increase in its userbase since its takeover by Facebook. You can use a hashtag to promote your video in a particular area or demographic group and highlight features of the property that buyers may be looking for.
Instagram also has an excellent cross platform sharing capability. You can share your video to Facebook and Twitter directly from Instagram. Both of these platforms allow your video to be shared easily and if your video gets traction with the right groups of people, it can go viral.
A good strategy to follow is to market your open house video on Instagram with carefully chosen hashtags. This should put it in front of the right people, who in turn will share it into the right groups of people on other platforms.
LinkedIn is a fantastic and much underused way to increase the reach of your video. Your LinkedIn connections are often a completely different set of people than your Facebook friends and Instagram followers. Each new view leads to more views as your open house video is shared and as it gets traction, this can increase exponentially. While the tone of LinkedIn is very different to that of Facebook, it is still an excellent resource. Investors, property companies and realtors all maintain strong presences on LinkedIn, allowing you access to potential buyers that may normally be overlooked.
The audience of your open home video on social media will not be as focused as that on a real estate website. However, the larger audiences combined with well-chosen keywords, hashtags etc. mean it can be a very worthwhile investment.
For a OPEN HOUSE VIDEO contact me at 312 798 9332 or info@tishalittlejohn.com.
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