Are you getting full value out of your virtual tour?

Savvy agents know how to use virtual tours to full advantage, making them into a tool that distinguishes their marketing from their competitors.

They understand that a real estate website is a lot like a blank page. It has to be filled with content that is interesting and relevant to homebuyers and sellers. They know the website has to be marketed, too. People won’t necessarily go to the Internet and automatically find a website or its virtual tours without some advertising effort on the agent’s part. However, the smart agent understands the internet is a powerful selling agent, at work 24/7, so they include their website address on their business cards, virtual tour sign riders on their yard signs, and a link to the virtual tour on the home’s flyer.

That’s simple integrated marketing!

Think about the importance of a business card. It wouldn’t do any good to keep them boxed. Business cards only bring a return on their investment when they are distributed by the agent to as many people as possible.

Yet agents spend hundreds, if not thousands, on websites that few consumers ever see. They don’t market the website, so they conclude that websites don’t work. Therefore, virtual tours won’t work either.

Virtual tours are powerful visual home-selling agents, but can fail as business generators if they are not marketed properly. If left “in the box” they won’t be seen by many consumers. But when agents make a concentrated effort to include them in their marketing strategy, the virtual home tour becomes the powerful selling agent it is designed to be.

Simply put, a virtual tour is a tool that needs to be utilized in order to receive maximum return on investment!

Location, Location, Location!

Just as physical location plays a key role in the marketability of a home, online presence and visibility play an equally-important part considering 60% of internet users take virtual tours and reduce wasted viewings by 40%! The internet and email offer two of the most inexpensive, eco-friendly, and efficient ways to promote your listing. Considering listings with virtual tours are clicked open, on average 10 times more than those without, virtual tours are a powerful marketing tool.

10 Effective Ways to Integrate Virtual Tours in Your Listing Marketing:

• email alerts – to inform prospects and other Realtors of new listings
• email signature lines where correspondents can sign off with “See my new listing!” with a hyperlink to your newest tour(s)
• content for the agent’s website(s) – “See my listings”
• content for the agent’s newsletter, or market conditions reports
• content for listing presentations that illustrate what the agent can do to market the home online and to show where the home will be marketed online: Realtor.com, franchise websites, personal websites, newspaper and other media websites, and more
• content to help convince sellers of the importance of staging, decluttering, remodeling, lighting, and more
• a competitive edge – that all the agent’s listings get a virtual tour regardless of the home’s price
• sign riders to invite drive-by consumers to the agent’s website to learn more
• an accounting tool for the agent to see if a certain advertising site is pulling in prospects or not
• a reporting tool to inform the seller to help determine if the listing is priced properly in the current market

Gone are the days when the average consumer dug through the yellow pages to find information. Now, each day, millions turn to the internet to search for information and they expect it to arrive efficiently; search engine sites like Google return pages of info in about a second. It’s very powerful. Employ these cost-effective, yet simple integrated marketing tactics for the maximum return on your virtual tour investment.

If you are interested in additional virtual home tour statistics, click this link, if you’d like to see some of our work, please enjoy our virtual home tour gallery, and if you have additional questions, or would like to schedule a virtual tour, please contact us today!

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