In recent years, agents have begun to utilise the power of video to attract vendor views and help convert them into property inspections. Real estate agencies have also utilised video to better present their team, expertise and results.
Video is effective for its ease in capturing the attention of property buyers and vendors. It is one of the most powerful elements in an agent’s advertising and marketing arsenal, as search engines become more intelligent in how they index web content.
However, it is a medium that is still not fully understood in the real estate industry, and the ways in which video can have a positive impact for agents may begin to change.
Video is only as strong as the strategy behind it. Surprisingly, beyond search engine optimisation (SEO) benefits, video may not necessarily be the optimal way to generate leads for the agency.
Here are 10 reasons why video is probably not generating the right traffic to your agency website:
1. Your video content doesn’t fit into your SEO strategy
When developing your video content, ensure that it is produced, distributed and promoted using keywords you are already targeting in your broader SEO campaign. This assists in keeping everything uniform, which enables your video content to help improve your rankings among your targeted keywords.
2. It doesn’t fit into your overall marketing strategy
The beauty of video is that it is a medium that can be housed on your website, social media platforms, and be shared via e-newsletters and emails to those platforms. Ensure the video content is suitable for both your website and social media. Regardless of whether it is being viewed in high definition, your video should still communicate its message and be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Above all, ensure that your video content maintains the aesthetic and tone of the rest of your marketing material.
3. It doesn’t have the right messaging
The messaging of your video content needs to serve the end of the overall marketing campaign, otherwise it won’t be effective in securing positive leads from vendors. If your goal is to increase traffic to your website, then your video content must directly prompt watchers to visit your website and consider selling their property with you. By including a call to action, it will enable viewers to easily decide their next step.
4. You don’t have a goal for your video content
During the planning stages of developing your video content, establish what your goal is and how you plan to record success. For example, if you want to generate more web traffic with video you should have the video contain a link to your website, at which point you can use analytics to see how many users travel from the video to the site.
5. Your video isn’t SEO friendly
To ensure that your video content is discoverable by search engines, the same basic SEO principles still apply as for written content. Make sure that your video has a short, concise title, along with a description and file name that include your most valuable keywords for SEO purposes.
6. You’ve over-capitalised on video
The problem with over-capitalising on video marketing is that the tech-savvy modern audience is already routinely bombarded by video messaging on all screen devices. On TV, on PCs and on social media apps, people are beginning to be highly selective in what they watch. This can mean the hard work you put into creating video content results in low engagement.
7. You haven’t dedicated the required time or budget to your video content
Video is the big swinging club of digital marketing: it has a big hit, but can be quite cumbersome and inflexible to use. Unless you have a large production budget and the ability to produce quality video content on the fly, video can be an expensive money pit that doesn’t give you a lot of versatility after the cameras stop rolling.
8. Video is not always the best way to reach your audience
If you have an audience that is primarily elderly or is not very technologically literate (which is not uncommon in the real estate industry), then focusing too much on video content can alienate or be totally ignored by said audience. Some regional areas have slow internet connections and residents in those areas are unlikely to wait for your marketing message to load before moving on to something else.
9. Video doesn’t suit your audience
Video requires your audience to have a certain amount of free time to dedicate their attention and this isn’t always practical to expect.
10. Your video content isn’t optimised for different platforms, browsers and devices
It can also be difficult to get video content to display correctly across multiple platforms and in different kinds of web browsers.
Video is great, but you need to rethink its usefulness to your agency. There’s no doubt that video is a powerful way to engage potential vendors and it would be inaccurate to say that it absolutely can’t help generate leads. However, given the hit-and-miss nature of video marketing, it’s safe to say that, as part of your overall marketing makeup, video takes a back seat to the proven effectiveness of highly targeted static messaging.
