In the following Q & A, Christian Sterner, Co-Founder of WellcomeMat, will address what real estate video marketers need to accomplish to stay successful and connect with their audience.
Q: Since all video views are not created equal, what should real estate professionals keep in mind as they plan out their video strategy in order to emotionally connect with consumers?
A: 2013 is not only going to be a great year for the real estate industry, it will also be the year that leading agents, brokers and brands get their video strategies right. There are massive amounts of bumps and bruises to laugh off from real estate video’s past and, with video season (otherwise known as spring) right around the corner, it’s time to nail down our video strategies. The theme of this response is not all views are created equal.
If your video goals are like ours, you are looking to emotionally connect with your customers, make your business more efficient and—wherever possible—win new business. Once you’ve created video content, you likely tried to find satisfaction by getting your total view count(s) up. Getting views is great, but with little help in the way of video adoption by real estate search sites (REALTOR.com being the exception), the real estate industry and our customers are being dealt a bad hand:
• Real estate consumers are watching more videos on YouTube than real estate industry sites/mobile apps. NOTE: YouTube is NOT designed to serve consumer’s real estate information needs beyond watching your, or your competitors’ videos.
• Consumers have way less capability to take meaningful action from YouTube. This means more fragmentation in how they find real estate content and less leads/connections made between viewers and industry professionals whom are investing a lot of time and money on video content.
In 2013, successful real estate video marketers need to instill three very important facts into our heads:
1. The vast majority of customers arrive to video content from true search engines (the kind that send traffic to publisher sites, not YouTube) and secondarily, social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
2. Connecting with video viewers and providing them with valuable next steps are responsibilities best handled by agent, broker and brand sites or mobile applications.
3. Not all video views are created equal!
Coming next: How will you, the master real estate video marketer, position your website and mobile applications as the source/publisher of video content?
For more information, visit www.wellcomemat.com.
