Today’s “Ask the Expert” column features Marcellee Williams, the Producer & Manager of Customer Success for WellcomeMat.
Q: What are your top tips for getting the most from real estate-related video interviews?
A: Video interviews are a hugely powerful tool in real estate marketing. They engender trust and likeability when you include testimonial interviews in your bio video. And video interviews with people who genuinely care about the property you want to sell instantly increase the personality of property and neighborhood tours.
However, interviews tend to be one of the most difficult aspects of video marketing. In order to achieve genuine, heartfelt answers that don’t feel contrived or scripted, you can’t, unfortunately, contrive or script them. You have to ask the right questions, in the correct way, to inspire answers from your interviewees that are useful. This is no small task!
Here at WellcomeMat, we have a few tried-and-true tips for conducting and getting the best from real estate video interviews.
– Get to know your subject ahead of time and help them become comfortable talking with you. Cameras are intimidating, and a welcoming interview environment will lead to far more engaged and interesting storytelling.
– Ask for descriptive answers. Keep in mind the visuals you’ll be using and ask the homeowners to describe the buildings or rooms if you’re interviewing them about a property. They will see things your fresh eyes might miss. A few interview prompts to consider:
Why is this your favorite room?
What’s your favorite place to go in the neighborhood?
Describe the most interesting part of this house.
– Keep in mind that in most finished videos, the interview questions are rarely included, just the answers. When an interviewee does not qualify their answers with the question, it is impossible to understand what they are referring to. Asking them to repeat the question in their answer is a helpful way to get useable quotes. Asking, “What is it about me as an agent that you find trustworthy?” frequently results in answers that are unusable, like, “Your experience.” Asking for a qualified answer can result in an answer that is perfect for a video: “When my head was spinning with all that I needed to do to purchase my home, I knew that I could trust because of her 20 years of experience in the industry.”
– Another technique to encourage the interview subject to avoid one-word, unusable answers is to ask more than one question at once. This also forces a subject to qualify their answers in a more natural way. For example, asking “How long have you lived in this house and what’s your favorite room?” will result in an answer similar to “We’ve lived here for five years and the kitchen is my favorite room!”
Have you successfully incorporated interviews into your real estate videos? What questions did you ask? We’d love to see your work. Share your tips, ideas, questions and videos at new.wellcomemat.com/neighborhood.
