One of the reasons for having a blog is the opportunity for people to get to know you and gain some insight into who you are, in addition to providing a means of education or simply sharing a point-of-view. For this rainy day, I’ll share some insight into my “artistic” side and tie it back to it’s importance in real estate. One of the most important jobs of any listing agent/broker is to “cast the net” of marketing as widely as possible. Only then, can we really know that free market principles will apply and the Seller should theoretically be positioned to derive the highest price available in the marketplace. The consumer marketing world began a radical and rapidly accelerating change with the internet that affected how we market to them, and what types of content are most effective. We are now seeing enormous change in where people look for information and how they can most effectively be influenced. In fact, some see this radical evolution in our culture as more profound than the industrial revolution.
To effectively market in today’s world, it is IMPERATIVE that one use every possible strategic marketing tool available that has a demonstrated high value of success. Placing a real estate listing on the internet via some “feed” from the MLS is simply not enough. That happens automatically, so really, there is NO marketing going on. Placing ads in newspapers, “targeted magazines”, or those wonderful assortment of “home” magazines found at the car wash, are also a completely ineffective waste of marketing dollars. I’ve never heard of anyone who bought a home because they saw it advertised while waiting for their car to be washed, and I doubt if you know of any either.
The New World of consumer marketing requires that rich, captivating media be used to convey information to consumers. With the advent of what is referred to as “Web 2.0″ technology, the use of videos for presenting consumer advertising information has grown at an astounding rate. The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” has been proved in this age of visual displays and internet marketing. Psychologists claim that more than 93% of communication is nonverbal, and over 90% of Internet users prefer watching a video to reading an article. Similarly, statistics show that 60%+ of all consumers watch online videos. As an added bonus, “viral marketing” has now proven to be extremely effective as consumers watch product, real estate, or other related videos and then forward them to their social or business network.
For those who haven’t yet figured it out, in spite of being a bit of a jock all of my life, I’m a geek. I confess to being both a business geek as well as a tech geek. On the other hand, not as many people know about my artistic side… a life-long passion for photography that started as a child when my bedroom was located next door to my professional photographer father’s darkroom. I’ve had an opportunity to shoot and learn from some of the finest photographers in the business over the years, including attending a Yosemite workshop with the legendary Ansel Adams when I was a teenager. Over the years, I’ve shot landscapes, portraits, architectural work, as well as fashion and commercial shoots. If my parents had not pushed me down a long academic route, I probably would have tried to make it in the competitive world of commercial photography. So… when there is an opportunity to blend my “artistic” side with the tech and business geek, I rush to the occasion.
The strategic imperative of using video technology in the presentation of real estate marketing has provided the perfect opportunity to blend my artistic inclinations with the power of technology. We are now using a company that does professional video work to produce videos of all of our listings and also to convey a rich visual learning experience to consumers about the surrounding communities. Our first video is the one posted in this blog about Lafayette… a couple of articles back. The videos are being added to every real estate web site that provides the capability of hosting them, as well as being linked from various sites to YouTube where it is also resident. In fact, YouTube has emerged as the SECOND largest search engine in the world, surpassing Yahoo behind Google!!!
Naturally, the quality of the video presentation is very important, which is where I get to use some of my artistic influence. It is also why we use a commercial producer to fit all of the pieces together into a video that presents well and holds the viewer’s interest. Simply posting the videos on the net is not enough. They need to be Search Engine Optimized (SEO) so that they are readily recognized by the various search engines. This isn’t a one time event, rather a complex process of creating content that can be “crawled” by the search engines and then properly tagging the content… then promoting it via a complex series of linkages between websites and Social Media sites that must be continually maintained. We also augment it with some added SEO “tricks” to make sure our content is found by the largest number of targeted real estate consumers possible.
The artist and tech/business geek in me approaches this marketing work as a challenge. It’s gratifying to see it work, and its success is measurable. It also makes a huge difference in the exposure level of our clients’ properties, potentially shortening marketing time and increasing the potential price point realized in the marketplace. Video and Social Media is the new Marketing for Today and Tomorrow. For those who doubt it’s importance, I encourage you to watch the following video on the Social Media Revolution:
And, for those who don’t want to look for our first Community Video on Lafayette, CA… here it is again:
