Realtor's Guide to Video Marketing for Real Estate Lead Generation

Realtor's guide to video marketing

In this Realtor's guide to video marketing for real estate, I'll walk you through everything you need to know to harness the power of video.

The power and momentum of video on the internet is astounding right now. If you scroll through your Facebook or Instagram feeds it's safe to say it's dominated by of autoplaying videos like straight out of Harry Potter's world.

What you probably don't realize is that the power of everything like static images and text is diminishing. Right now, if you want to be noticed, you need to be publishing videos.

People want to see your face, hear your voice, and get their own first impression of you—all before ever meeting you face-to-face.

To put the power of video into perspective check out these confirmed marketing stats for 2017 in this blog post by Forbes:

By 2019, global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic.
Facebook generates 8 billion video views on average per day.
YouTube reports mobile video consumption rises 100% every year.
55% of people watch videos online every day.
After watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online.
Including a video on your homepage can increase conversion rates by 20% or more.

Video marketing is too great of an opportunity for your business and life that you can’t ignore as a real estate agent.

This beginner’s guide will give you the information, tools, and resources needed to get started.

Types of Video You Could Be Creating

Before you dive headfirst into pumping out video marketing content to grow your real estate business, let's do a little planning and go over which types of videos you'll want to create for your audience.

Property Tour Videos: Video tours that give a behind-the-scenes look at new or just interesting listings. You can focus on certain neighborhoods or property types.

Real Estate Q&A Videos: As real estate pros, we know lots of information that the average home buyer or seller has no idea of. Think of those questions and pump out quick videos answering those questions about the homebuying process.
Community Spotlight Videos: Give video tours of the communities and neighborhoods and feature different businesses and attractions and ask them to share your video with their audience on Facebook.
Testimonial & Client Story Videos: Short, impromptu videos of your happy customers talking about their experience buying and/or selling a home with you. Do these at the closing table while you wait for final copies.

Industry Education Videos: Record videos where you educate your audience on different industry trends (like first-time homebuyer loans, the closing process, etc).

Quick Tip Videos: 20-second videos that offer super short tips for people thinking about buying or selling their home.

Niche-Buyer Videos: Videos that are intended for a specific audience, such as first-time homebuyers, downsizers, millennials.

The type of videos you start creating should ultimately depend on your target audience or in other words, the types of clients you want. As such, it’s important to spend time thinking about who your ideal client is, what questions they have, and how you can help.

Doing so will help ensure that you’re always making videos that are not just relevant but that actually serve and help your clients.

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Video Marketing for Real Estate Best Practices

Before creating your first video, let's cover some video marketing best practices:

Be real, don’t be cheesy. Cheesiness comes across very clearly on video. If you decide to invest in video as a way to market your business, you have to come across as a genuine, caring human being on video. In other words, don’t sell to people—just have a conversation with them.

Be professional, but be informal. The videos you create will shape your personal brand and reputation, so it’s important that you keep things relatively professional. Dress appropriately, communicate appropriately, and make videos that your grandparents could watch and be proud of. That all being said, don't be overly-professional, and be yourself.**Remember: your goal should be informal and conversational. You want people to feel like it would be comfortable talking to you and working with you.**

Focus on your customer, not yourself. When you’re the main subject of a video, it can be tempting to make it all about you, especially when you’re talking about something you’re passionate about. But the best videos you create will be the ones that focus on your customer and the value of the information being shared not the ones where you talk too much about yourself or your business.

Keep videos relatively short. People don’t have long attention spans when it comes to video, especially when they are watching from their smartphones. For best results, keep most of your videos under two minutes. Property tours can be longer, but no more than five minutes max.

When you can, invest in better equipment. When you’re first getting started, you can use your iPhone or Android smartphone to record your videos, but if you see the videos making an impact, make a plan to start investing in better equipment sooner than later. Like a tripod, external microphone or even better camera.

Don’t be afraid to try something new. Don’t be afraid to think about and test out new video concepts for your real estate business. Every audience is different and will respond to different video types and messages.

Let your personality shine. Remember, the videos you create will often serve as your first impression for a lot of people. As such, it’s important to let your personality shine in order to help people get a better understanding of who you are, why you do what you do, how you can help them, and why they should work with you and not one of your competitors.

Be enthusiastic, but not cheesy. If you’re not used to being on video, it may take you a while to become comfortable on camera. The best thing you can do is be as enthusiastic as possible, without coming across as cheesy. Enthusiasm and charisma are natural attractors and will likely make them more excited to work with you over someone else.

Tools You Can Use

There are a number of tools you can use to create, edit, and share videos for your real estate business. Here are a few recommendations for beginners:

For Recording Video: iPhone, Android, GoPro, or a nicer camera if you have one or can invest in one.

For Editing Video on iPhone: Splice or iMovie

For Editing Video on Android: Magisto or VivaVideo

For Editing Video on a Computer: iMovie or FinalCut Pro

For Holding Your Smartphone or GoPro in Place: The Foneso Monopod (also works as a selfie stick for property tours)

For Publishing Video: YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Snapchat, or BigMarker.

For Sharing Video: Buffer

Getting Started: First Steps

When you’re finally feeling ready to start investing in video as a way to promote your real estate business and connect with new clients, consider taking the following first steps:

Step 1: Decide & Commit. Review the list above and decide on 1-2 video types that you can test first. If you try to do too many in a short amount of time, chances are you’ll end up overwhelming yourself and giving up on video altogether. Also, commit to a schedule and hold yourself accountable.

Step 2: Set your budget. The second step you should take is it set your budget. You should decide how much money you can invest in producing videos—i.e. how much can you spend on equipment and software. If you're gonna stick with your iPhone, then at least update your audio with an external microphone, like this one from Rode.

Step 3: Gather your equipment. Once you’ve decided on your budget, gather and ready your equipment for making your first video. For some, this will be as simple as making sure their iPhone is charged and has enough storage space available for a high-quality video. For others, it might mean purchasing a new camera, tripod, mic, and other video accessories.

Step 5: Dive in! In order for video marketing to work, you really have to go all in. You can’t get to it when you have extra time—you have to be fully invested and consistent to reap the most benefits!*

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