Learn why you should start making videos for your real estate business and some compelling reasons why maybe you should focus elsewhere. Plus a sneak peak behind the scenes to look at performance data from some of our top videos.
Video Transcript:
Everyone wants to make videos these days! We are convinced they are the best and most engaging content. This is sometimes very true and sometimes absolutely false.
We started ramping up our video production summer of 2020 and have produced over 100 videos in the 7 months since then ranging from short 3 minute videos like the marketing videos I make all the way up to hour or so long studio produced, shot, and edited videos that my colleague Andy Waller creates.
So . . .
Why should you make videos?
Videos can have some of the highest mindspace return of any marketing asset. That’s a weird way of saying you can get the most attention captured with a video compared to the cost of a video vs other types of marketing assets.
If you think about it you are lucky to keep the attention with any of your sphere members for a few seconds every month via your marketing. The buyers journey in real estate is 10 years long! The average person in your sphere only cares about real estate for 6 months out of every decade! So how can you capture their attention for more that the few seconds a text, message, or social post captures? And how can you do this consistently so you are grabbing quality mindspace every day, week, month, year?
Well, because videos are long form content and social media platforms currently favor video content, if you can figure out a way to create engaging video content at an extremely low cost, you can maximize the amount of attention and mindspace you marketing garners to ensure you lock down your sphere’s loyalty as they crawl through that decade long journey between real estate transactions!
First things first, you need to understand the ROI of your video content and of all your marketing content in general. This technically isn’t ROI but take it from someone who has been in the marketing agency industry for long time, everyone wants to talk about ROI but most of the time they can’t really measure it and end up making it up. What we are interested in is being able to calculate the ratio of marketing output to cost input. This gives us an ROI of sorts or an understanding of the value of that marketing piece. The general equation is:
MARKETING IMPACT / COST = VALUE OF THAT MARKETING
In many cases on social media the marketing impact will be measured by something like impressions, minutes viewed, reach, eyeballs etc. When it’s your goal to keep your sphere of a few hundred people engaged with you to some level for a DECADE at a time, this sort of metric is what we care about! How many of the people in our sphere are seeing our content? How many of they are being reminded that we exist as a baller RE agent? And how often are we reminding them of that fact?
We measure cost in terms of time spent to produce the marketing piece. Cranking out a social post might take you a matter of minutes and bee seen by a few dozen people. Making a video could take you hours if you aren’t careful. Guess how long my average marketing minute video takes me, from start to finish? I’m talking from the second I start thinking about what I’ll do the video on all the way through to when it is posted on the 3 social media outlets we use and on our website. No more than 20 minutes!
So as an example let’s take this video for example. This video took me about 20 minutes to produce. So far (it’s been 2 weeks) that video has 242 minutes of view time on Facebook alone. So that’s a 10x return on my time spent. Those numbers blow us away. We spent 20 minutes of our time and captured the attention of our marketing audience for 242 minutes!
STOP – do not pass the video GO UNLESS:
You are getting close to posting on social every day for your business.
You are likely to get the best ROI for the time you spend marketing your real estate business AT FIRST by getting into a good groove for posting to social media. Your average post should take only a few minutes, if that, to create. And it should be seen by around 20% of your audience. And posts are way easier to create consistently than videos. So start with posting! Then once you dominate that, move on to videos.
If you are struggling to come up with content we do recommend using this free automated social media service. We’ve seen it perform well for many of our agents. Or you could consider doing their paid version, which performs even better!