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6 Simple Tools for Creating Animated Real Estate Marketing Videos

by Katie Russell | Feb 12, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing | 0 comments

When it comes to real estate marketing, video is not just the future — it’s now. These 6 tools will give you a leg up on creating animated images, GIFs, and videos that will elevate your marketing presence.

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Highlights:

• Savvy real estate marketers are making video a central part of their strategy.
• Animated videos can be surprisingly easy and affordable to create, with the right tools.
• These are our 6 favorite tools for creating GIFs, animated images, and videos

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We’ve written a lot about video marketing as a trend that isn’t going anywhere and how it’s a natural fit for real estate marketers. It can be one of the best and most cost-effective ways to grow your social media audience and generate leads. And the numbers are backing us up — research from Social Media Examiner has shown that nearly two-thirds (63%) of marketers use video content in their social media marketing.

Savvy real estate marketers are jumping on the video bandwagon, but the process can still be intimidating. Creating an animated image, GIF, or video can sound impossibly difficult —particularly if you’re over the age of 15! But in reality, there are plenty of tools that make creating these items not only simple but cost effective as well.

Here are our 6 favorite tools for creating animated real estate marketing videos.

1)     WhatFix

This free tool is incredibly handy for creating animated flows, such as how-to videos (“How to search for your first apartment,” for example). WhatFix allows you to create easy flows showing the steps your audience should take. All you need is WhatFix’s extension for Firefox or Chrome to build widgets that you can imbed on your website or send “live” to your audience. The website will guide you through the simple process of creating a flow.

2)     Gyazo

When it comes to creating GIFs, this free tool will make it as simple as it gets. Technically, Gyazo is a screen-capture tool, which now lets you capture and save GIFs and videos. The platform is straight forward, and while it doesn’t necessarily have advanced tools, it’s ideal for taking a screen capture from a video and turning it into an eye-catching GIF.

3)     Make a GIF

Make a GIF is a more extensive tool than Gyazo, which allows you to choose from multiple options to create your GIF. It lets you use screenshots, YouTube videos, uploaded videos, or pre-made GIFs. It has the added benefit of being a free image hosting site, which means that once you’ve created your GIF, you can link directly to it from the website’s gallery. Make a GIF is free, and lets you create an account to store your creations, or request that they be deleted any time.

4)     PowToon

For $59 a month (or $19 a month if you buy for at least a year), PowToon lets you create animated video and presentations, and export them to YouTube. All you have to do is “pick a look you like” from one of five animation themes. Then you can put together characters, objects, layouts, backgrounds, and anything else you need to tell your story.

5)     VideoScribe

VideoScribe offers a free trial, and pricing ranging from $29 a month to a one-time purchase of $665. This tool specializes in whiteboard videos, giving you the potential to create clean, engaging video animations. It’s not a web tool, but a downloadable software, that you can even take offline if you purchase the Pro plan.

6)     Moovly

For $24.92 a month (though it does offer a free trial period), Moovly is a “drag, drop, and animate” tool that lets you create quick animated real estate marketing videos in your web browser. It can create explainer videos, whiteboard animations, advertisements, and more. Not only that, it gives you 750,000 free video clips to work from.

Creating videos is one of the best ways out there to boost your real estate marketing game. These 6 tools go a long way towards making the process affordable and easy. If you try one, let us know in the comments how it turned out!

Related posts:

• 3 Ways to Boost Your Real Estate Marketing with Video
• How Inbound Marketing for Real Estate Works to Improve Sales
• 4 Real Estate Marketing Trends 2018

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Developing Your Real Estate Brand with Video Marketing

by Katie Russell | Jul 11, 2019 | Blog, Real Estate Marketing | 0 comments

Here’s why video marketing is essential to developing your real estate brand and how to make video marketing work for you.  

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Highlights:

• A majority of marketing professionals already use video — 87% consider it one of their marketing tools
• Video marketing is an excellent way to bring a powerful, sales-driven message to life.
• A host of positive factors justify an extended effort into the creation of valuable video content.

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It’s no secret that video marketing has an integral role to play in any well-rounded marketer’s toolkit. No matter what you’re selling — using videos as an avenue to create content, promote products and services, and connect with your audience is well-known to boost sales and increase brand awareness. 

Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate the potential of video marketing lies in hard statistics. We’ve rounded up a few of the most notable ones here to drive home just how hungry consumers are for video content: 

• 85% of web users in the U.S. watch video content online on a monthly basis  
• As many as 54% of consumers indicate they want to see video content from brands they support  
• A majority of marketing professionals already use video — 87% consider it one of their marketing tools 

It’s evident that audiences love video — and savvy marketers have already caught on. Below, we’ve outlined how an effective video marketing strategy can help contribute to the development of your real estate brand. Whether you’re crunching numbers or considering your brand’s reach in a less tangible way, it’s virtually impossible to speak about marketing success without including video.  

How Video Marketing Contributes to the Development of Your Real Estate Brand 

Bringing your value proposition to life      

Your value proposition helps paint a picture of how your services solve customers’ problems. This establishes relevancy. It’s also responsible for providing your audience with a quantified value, or an explanation of specific benefits that your brand delivers. Finally, it explains why clients should work with you instead of turning to your competition. 

Video marketing is an excellent way to bring this powerful, sales-driven message to life. We can communicate much more quickly and effectively via video (which allows us to leverage visuals and audio) than through writing. Through video, you can show future clients exactly what they have to gain from working with you.  

Increased brand awareness    

Brand awareness is integral to business success. You want potential clients and customers to heavily associate your brand and properties with something positive, useful, or necessary — this not only positions you as an ideal choice when it comes time to get to work, but it ensures that your audience will be able to recall your existence later, too.  

If you leverage video marketing properly, you can strengthen your brand message, promote your name, and increase brand awareness. Sticking to content that abides by, or expands upon, your value proposition helps make this easy to achieve.  

Lower costs per lead  

Marketing can get expensive fast. As price-per-lead creeps up, the monetary payoff of the effort you put in behind the computer screen or camera starts to nosedive. Video marketing makes for an ideal lead acquisition strategy because it has an exceptionally low cost-per-lead.  

Other marketing methods like SEO, retargeting, and email marketing often run cheaper, but are not always as effective or take longer to pay off. Today’s consumers want their options laid out in front of them — not clogging up email inboxes or hiding five pages deep in search engine results pages. 

No matter your reason for exploring your video marketing options, a host of positive factors justify an extended effort into the creation of valuable video content. Your clients and customers will love getting a more intimate view of your brand, while your sales and marketing teams will funnel their efforts into marketing that’s both engaging and profitable. 

Related posts: 

• 5 Effective Ways to Use Instagram for Your Luxury Real Estate Brand 
• Infographic: Best Video Distribution Channels for Real Estate Marketing 
• Paid Social Advertising: Why Your Property Should Invest in Lead Ads 

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Our 6 Favorite Marketing Automation Tools for Real Estate Marketers

by Elizabeth Hines | Jun 13, 2018 | Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Social Media | 0 comments

Check out these marketing automation tools for email workflows, social media scheduling, and customer relationship management.

Lately it seems like everyone is talking about marketing automation. As real estate buyers increasingly demand personalized experiences through the buyer’s journey, marketers’ jobs are getting tougher. They need to provide custom lead-nurturing content to all prospects in their databases.

And that’s where automating marketing tasks can help.

The term “marketing automation” refers to a variety of tools used to automate the process of personalizing leads’ interactions with your property. The sheer variety of these tools can sometimes be overwhelming — so we’ve pulled a few of our favorites in the categories of email workflows, social media scheduling tools, and customer relationship management.

6 marketing automation tools for real estate marketers

Email workflows

1. Customer.io

This tool lets you send targeted messages to your prospects, crafting them based on how they interact with your property, and making personalized messages simple. You can also keep track of conversions and create customer profiles. Our favorite part? It integrates with your mobile app or website, letting you see data in real time and trigger actions by adding in predefined rules.

2. Constant Contact

This powerful tool has some features that are unique — and can take your marketing capabilities beyond the basics. Beyond setting up and managing an automated database, Constant Contact offers Facebook fan promotion, coupons and deals, and event management.

Social media scheduling tools

3. AdRoll

This is an extremely effective tool for retargeting prospects through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere on the web. It offers cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities, as well as flexible segmentation, letting you provide customized experiences that dramatically improve your marketing efficiency. It also offers customized budgeting and full control over ad spend.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

4. Pardot

Pardot is an all-inclusive marketing automation suite, but it’s particularly strong for amping up your engagement with CRM integration. It’s a great tool for helping your sales team shorten the sales cycle. And, in addition to CRM integration, it offers email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting.

5. Marketo

This cloud-based marketing software lets you drive revenue with lead management and mobile marketing. It not only helps build prospect relationships, but it helps you sustain them as well. Best of all, you can try it out for free until you’re sure it’s right for your company.

Bonus all-in-one tool: HubSpot

HubSpot is an inbound-marketing tool that lets you generate leads, close deals, and manage your sales pipeline from start to finish. It integrates beautifully with a content marketing strategy, with the goal of turning outbound leads into inbound ones. It includes revenue reporting, custom-event reporting, custom-event automation triggers, predictive-lead scoring, contacts and company reporting, and event-based segmentation.

What marketing automation tools do you use?

Related posts:

• Infographic: Real Estate Marketing Trends 2018
• 10 Social Media Statistics for Real Estate Marketers 2018
• How to Measure Brand Awareness: A Guide for Real Estate Marketers

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When Traditional Real Estate Marketing Methods Stop Working, Try Digital Marketing

by Elizabeth Hines | Aug 8, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Residential | 0 comments

A new digital marketing program helped one real estate marketing firm reinvent itself after traditional methods proved ineffective.

A prominent real estate marketing firm was experiencing an all-too-familiar predicament: They had a great product that, for some reason, was not selling. They had been following their traditional marketing regimen; however, something about the purchasing landscape seemed to have shifted, and in a way that rendered their methods ineffective.

Then, a new content marketing program changed everything in just a few months. For the better.

The firm’s business was real estate marketing, and their great product, a community of new homes in a highly desirable location.

Real estate, like so many other sectors, has experienced a major shift in buyer behavior in just the last two decades, with the majority of research being conducted online. The firm realized that a digital marketing strategy, unlike traditional print ads, could better reach a wider audience of potential homebuyers.

In less than 90 days after implementing the new content marketing program, sales increased by nearly 40%. Within the year, social reach grew by 325%, web traffic by 250%, and sales by 300%.

Download this case study to learn how the firm achieved such remarkable results.

Related posts:

• 5 Tips for Building a Successful Real Estate Social Media Marketing Program
• Using Content Marketing to Market and Sell Luxury Real Estate
• Learn How Content Marketing Increased Real Estate Sales by 37% in 90 Days

 

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Using Messaging Platforms for Real Estate to Deliver Content

by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 25, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Social Media | 0 comments

The 4 biggest messaging platforms now have more users than the 4 biggest social media platforms. Here’s how marketers are leveraging messaging platforms for real estate to deliver content to target audiences. 

Gone are the days when social messaging platforms were just about chatting or making plans with family and friends. You might be surprised to learn that “the combined total monthly active user count of the top 4 messaging apps has grown to 4.1 billion in 2018.” 

Just to put that in perspective, that’s well over half of the world’s population and — perhaps even more strikingly — dwarfs the 2.19 billion monthly active users that Facebook reported in the first quarter of 2018.  

It’s official: Social messaging platforms have surpassed “traditional” social media when it comes to active users. Not only that, marketers are taking notice, and beginning to think about how to leverage messaging platforms for real estate to deliver content to target audiences.  

Popular social messaging apps include, for instance, WhatsApp, Viber, Line, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger.  

Tip: Use conversational content on messaging platforms for real estate  

As you might expect, a key element in the successful use of using social messaging platforms is to tell your story conversationally. This means tailoring your content to the specific wants or needs of your target audience, creating a compelling narrative with your content, rather than an overt sales pitch. 

This kind of storytelling is fundamental to content marketing.   

“Messaging and chatbots represent the next logical extension of the content marketing mission,” writes Chris Frascella of the Content Marketing Institute. 

According to Thomas Husson of Forbes, “Messaging apps will introduce a paradigm shift for marketers where interactive and contextual conversations will replace ad broadcasting. New conversational interfaces will drive deeper relationships between consumers and brands.”  

You may be thinking that this is all well and good for marketing products, but how does it apply to real estate marketing? The truth is, if you have a content marketing strategy in place, chances are, you have a story to tell, and these are tools to help you do it. 

Chatbots 

Enter chatbots, the technology to turn your content into conversations. Chances are, you’ve already come face-to-screen with a chatbot and may not have even known it. 

These computer programs simulate human conversation using auditory or textual methods. Basically, it’s software that communicates with your target audience inside a messaging app. Chatbots are already changing the way businesses interact with their prospects — and with each other. 

If you’re thinking that you’re about to be replaced by a robot, relax. AI technology that could take the place of human interaction won’t happen anytime soon. Chatbots are a tool, and they need to be fed content and trained by human marketing professionals. 

Tips for using chatbots  

The first step is adapting your content for use in a chatbot conversation.  

“You can’t just duplicate existing content in your conversational scripts,” says Frascella.  

While the goals for your content are the same, the way it is delivered is different. That requires a shift in how it’s structured. 

It’s also important to be mindful of timing. Because chatbots require users to opt into conversations, retaining permission to access your audience in this way depends largely on content and timing. This means delivering engaging, meaningful, and valuable content at regular intervals, but not intrusively. 

For more ideas on creating a chatbot, check out this post. 

Social messaging platforms for real estate are opening new doors for you to deliver personalized content straight to your target audience. Make the most of this opportunity! 

Related posts:

• 10 Social Media Statistics for Real Estate Marketers 2018
• Good Real Estate Marketing Gets Personal
• Social Media Trends for 2018 Real Estate Marketers Need to Know