In the current environment, the need for a powerful marketing campaign has never been greater. While quality daytime photography remains the core of any successful marketing campaign, it is worth considering ramping up your marketing by combining different types of photography and other property marketing products.
These days, the race for buyers’ hearts and minds is being wonby sophisticated campaigns featuring a mix of professional daytime, dusk, elevated or aerial photography, coupled with marketing tools such as floor plans, virtual tours, virtual furniture, online property tours or professional copywriting. Let’s take a closer look at some of these products, and how you can use them to drive buyer interest and in turn maximise your sales result.
Elevated and Aerial Photography
Both elevated and aerial photography offer a totally different perspective when presenting a property to the market, highlighting key selling points such as its size, location, gardens and surrounding topography, none of which would be visible with regular photography.
Substantial homes with pools and gardens are well suited to elevated photography, which is taken using a high-end digital camera mounted onto a 20 metre extending telescopic mast, and remotely controlled by laptop computer. Larger properties, especially those in rural or coastal locations, really shine with aerial photography, shot with the same high-end camera but this time from an aircraft or helicopter at a range of altitudes.
Dusk Photography
If you want to inject your campaigns with some real ‘wow’ factor, then you can’t go past dusk photography. With its blending of natural and artificial light, and resulting atmospheric photos,this is a favourite weapon in many an agent’s marketing arsenal.
Against a backdrop of a dramatic dusk sky, properties with lit pools and gardens, and lots of front windows, really come to life at this type of day, helping buyers imagine returning to a welcoming home at the end of the day.
Floor Plans
Black and white floor plans are an old favourite when it comes to property marketing, but don’t forget there are other styles to choose from to help entice buyers.For something different try acoloured and textured plan, which shows off ahome’sinternal and external finishes, such as tiles or decking. Furniture can also be added to plansto give buyers an idea of potential furniture placements.For larger properties, site plans feature a home’s floor plan in relation to the layout of its gardens or grounds, including prominent external features and outbuildings.3D artist impressions, generated from detailed building plans by special 3D software, are perfect for bringing yet-to-be-built residential or commercial properties to life in a highly realistic fashion.
An effective way to combine your photographs and floor plans is through an online interactive floor plan. Symbols on the plan indicate the angle a photo was taken from, allowing buyers to easily navigate through a home by clicking on each photo, giving them a great feel for its flow and layout.
360 Degree Virtual Tours
360 degree rotating virtual tours are a powerful online marketing tool, allowing buyers to virtually inspect a property prior to the open home.
A cost-effective addition to your online marketing, virtual tours can be taken by the photographer when he or she is already on site shooting your photographs. A special virtual tour headis mounted onto the camera, which rotates 360 degrees taking up to 10 images of a room from one position, the images are then retouched and seamlessly stitched to create an uninterrupted 360 degree virtual tour.
Virtual Furniture
Images of empty properties are not as appealing as those with furniture, and give buyers very little idea of perspectiveand size, making it difficult for them to imagine the possibilities they could create in a home. If vendors don’t want to invest in property staging or hiring furniture, both of which can be prohibitively expensive, then a much more affordable option is to virtually furnish rooms. With this cutting-edge technique, images of real furniture are dropped into a room, and then rendered with the appropriate shadowing and perspective to ensure they look 100% realistic.
Just remember that with such flawless results you may want to pre warn buyers so they don’t get a shock at the inspection!
Online Property Tours & Videos
Online property tours are an affordable way of offering buyers a ‘video’ of a property, using a moving image slideshow set to background music or a voiceover. Usually you can select the order, speed and direction by which images pan and transition, as well as choosingbackground musicand includingvoiceovers and written descriptions. The finished tour is provided as a URL to load to your website or other property portal.
The beauty of property tours isthat you get to use the professional photography you’ve just invested in, avoiding the need to pay for a full-blown video production, which may be out of reach of the average vendor’s budget.
Other types of property videos range from professional property ‘films’, featuring an agent walking and talking viewers through a tour of the property, to more modest productions featuring an image slideshow, ‘topped and tailed’ with lifestyle or local area footage at the beginning or end.
Professional Copy Writing
If you struggle to find the right phrases to describe a property, or writing is not your forte, another option is to use a professional copywriter.
Not only does this help avoidthose tired real estate clichés that usuallyelicit groans from the general public, it also gives you the peace of mind that your brand is not being compromised by grammatically incorrect or poorly worded advertisements. Most importantly, itis professionally written to captivate and engage your target audience, leaving you to get on with what you’re best at – selling properties!
