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Your presence online is more important than ever, more and more CRE brokers are seeking out opportunities to establish their online presence. With that in mind many seem to stray far away from the world of video, particularly YouTube and it’s influence on online users. Before you decide to opt out on creating YouTube videos for your commercial real estate listings, check out our 4 reasons why CRE brokers must have a YouTube presence.
Let’s face it, we don’t always have time to read up on the latest news and market information, that’s why YouTube videos are amazing for those of us running short on time. Believe it or not, the longer your videos are, the lower your retention rate is. According to Single Grain, on average videos that are 1 minute or less in length garner a retention rate of 80%, 2-3 minute videos retain a bit less at 60%, and videos that are 5-10 minutes in length, retain 50% of viewers.
Just image what the retention rate of your lengthy and wordy, but informative blog posts may be. Creating a YouTube video that is short, informative, and engaging allows you to retain more of your viewers.
There are 3 types of learners; visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, and sometimes combination of all 3. Creating a presence on YouTube and creating content that is both visual and auditory allows a large amount of your audience the ability to digest your content in a way that whitepapers or wordy reports cannot. This allows you to give your audience a visual representation of the topic being discussed rather than just posting a long and wordy blog or article.
There are a number of different formats of YouTube videos you can create, there are:
Creating an impactful form of informative and engaging content establishes your credibility and knowledge as a commercial real estate broker. We all need something that separates us from the rest of the CRE Brokers. Prospective clients are much more likely to seek out your services and expertise if you appear to be an established, experienced, and knowledgeable in your industry. Simple videos that vary in topic and format will build your credibility and eventually establish it.
Demonstrate your knowledge, illustrate, create diagrams and models in your YouTube videos. Showing your viewers that you know what you’re talking about.
According to Placester, “more than 50% of prospective home buyers use Youtube as their primary video research.” And the same applies to commercial investors, buyers, and sellers. This means that your audience is actively using YouTube and they want more than just a slideshow of images, they want a format of content that is much more rich, interactive, and engaging. This can come in the form of property video tours, both inside and outside of the property and even videos that consist of tips and tricks for others within the industry.
Okay… we may have lied, social media works and you need to take advantage of it now! After a conversation with our very own, CCIM Troy Muljat about his real life experience using social media within his firm, we are more than convinced that social media isn’t just for the average social butterfly.
Facebook’s user base consists of over 2 billion users, according to Zephoria. This means that there is a possible 2 billion users encountering your commercial real estate ads everyday. Now keep in mind that while there are over 2 billion users on Facebook, not all 2 billion of those will encounter your ads. You are more likely to gain a better attraction to your commercial listing ad if you optimize and target your ad for your audience; investors, buyers, and sellers.
And Facebook Ads allows you to do just that, refine and target your audience down to their city, age, and even their interests, to ensure that the right people at the right time are seeing your ads.
Creating the right Facebook Ad can be a bit overwhelming and confusing at times and we want to help insure that you’re creating the best ads for your audience to ensure you’re generating those commercial real estate leads.
Here are a few tips we’ve put together with some help from some experts over at Hubspot.
Facebook offers 3 different ad placements, each is visually appealing but different and serves a different purpose. Chose the placement that will best showcase your listing to your audience, we would recommend the “Desktop News Feed Ad”. This ad is larger than their original “Right Column Ad,” which will allow you to better showcase your listing with rich and appealing visual content, like images and videos. “Desktop News Feed Ads” appear directly on your news feed and rather than appearing like a questionable ad on Facebook’s right column, it is more of a native form of advertisement, appearing right in your feed. Appearing right on their feed makes it difficult to ignore when your audience is already casually scrolling through their feed.
We would also recommend the “Mobile News Feed Ad” much like the “Desktop News Feed Ad,” this ad appears on your feed while on your mobile device. Investing in both will allow you to capture your audience when they’re both in the office on their desktop and while they’re on the go on their phones.
Being visual in your ads is imperative, according to Inc. “posts that include images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts” and the same can be applied to Facebook Ads. Being visual in your ads can come in the form of high res images of your commercial listings, inside and out or a video tour of your listing, again both inside and outside of your property.
Facebook Ads allows you to present your visual content by offering a number of different Ad Formats; from their Carousel Ad format to their Slide show Ad format, there is a different format for every goal.
Include a clear call to action that entices your audience to act now. May be it’s a sense of urgency that gets them to click or a simple call to action such as, “Schedule a Tour” or “Let’s Chat”. A clear and concise call to action will allow you to move those potential commercial leads further down the marketing funnel.
If you have a previous post for a listing on your Facebook page that could use a little extra attention, we’d recommend boosting that post. It should be noted that boosting a post is different than creating an ad, when you boost a post you to take one of your previous postings and deliver it to an audience of users who may not have had the chance to see it before. Boosting a post allows you to target your audience, customize your budget, schedule the boost, and more.