I've long been preaching to my Realtor friends that they need to buy a camera and start making short videos of their properties. I've seen several agents doing it, and I think it's an excellent way to market your listings - or other listings if you don't have one yourself. I don't understand why it isn't utilized more. As a buyer's agent or listing agent, you always visit homes and condos for sale. Why would you not bring a little camera and film the property?
I have a friend, Sunny Yates, who sells Charlotte real estate (North Carolina) and understands the value of video promotions. She also has a top ranking website, www.sunnyyates.com. I've seen a couple of the videos tonight, and was literally floored with them, and what an excellent marketing tool this can be.
One was a short, narrated video of some of Sunny's Charlotte MLS listings, and the other two are interviews with some of her affluent clients.
The first interview was with the NASCAR CHIC, who fell in love with and purchased a waterfront home on Lake Norman. As a former Jersey resident, she expresses what she enjoys about living on the lake. She and Sunny talk about her likes and interests, and of course, Nascar. She shows some clips of the boats and describes their great life in the beautiful Lake Norman community.
The next interview was promoting Charlotte real estate, again with a Lake Norman resident. I really think videos like these would go a long way into convincing someone to choose that neighborhood when relocating to the area.
Not only do these kinds of videos promote the property, but if a real estate agent has the looks and personality to be good on video, it can promote the agent as well. Anyone who sees these videos cannot help but be impressed, and a potential seller would see that she can advertise their home in ways that most Realtors never even think about.
According to Nielson and CNN Money, YouTube had 69 million visitors during the month of May. Is this not astounding? I think you should promote the videos through emails and in print, but YouTube's ready made (and free) traffic is there for the taking. There are also ways to make the videos show up in the search engines.
The big engines are moving closer and closer to bringing mixed media into the search results - sprinkling videos, blogs, and news articles in with webpages. As they work on perfecting the results that most please their users, the use of videos, and especially YouTube and Google videos are going to become extremely important to marketers. With the real estate slump that is going on around us, anything an agent can do to attract a buyer should be utilized and learned.
Like a website, you should use your key search terms in the video title, put a link to your website in the video description box, and take the time to type in a couple of paragraphs describing your property, or your interview or walk-thru. Better yet, make a transcript of the video and enter it in the place provided.
Use several good key-terms in the description as well. Submit your video to the various social and bookmarking sites, with optimized titles and descriptions. Have a section on your website that links to the videos. Take the time to write a blog posting about them and link to them from it.
Done correctly, you can promote the video that promotes yourself or your properties, and gain a tremendous edge over 90% of the other real estate agents who sit in the office and wait on the phone to ring. Truthfully, everything you do that promotes your website will reward you 10 times over if you take the time to do a quality job and learn how to get the search engines to notice.
Thankfully, there will be a need for real estate SEO providers for a while yet, and the good ones will teach their clients about videos, blogging, and all the other marketing methods that go hand in hand with websites and search engine traffic. Choosing a "real" seo expert out of all the rip-off companies gets harder all the time. But it's well worth the effort to find one who is experienced in real estate marketing and can help you with ideas and techniques to make that sale.
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I would agree that SEO is important, however, as a buyer I don't believe that Google will be the first place I look for a house. There are MLS searching tools out there, one of my favorites is Redfin because it let's me search using a map. On these sites it is most important to distinguish yourself from the other listings and stand out. VIDEO is the best way to do that in my humble opinion. In fact, video tours and other commentary are so new, there isn't a good indicator online as to which properties have video or not.
Check out the video tour icon I use within the main property image. This way you can let people know there is a video to be seen! Partner up with a new media and video person to get these little tweaks done right!