So today I want to talk about something that is coming up a lot more for estate agencies.
Which is the trend towards video.
Which goes under the banner of a video-first strategy.
Which essentially means that when you’re looking at doing any kind of marketing.
You first think about whether it’s possible to do it with video and if so, you do it with video, and if not.
You do whatever.
A blog doesn’t mean it’s video only,it means video first. Anyway, one of the big hurdles a lot of agencies are finding is the huge amount of investment, time,energy, resources required to do a video.
Might be an area guide, might be an interview, whatever, a Vlog,and then they upload it to YouTube,
it just kind of sits there and two weeks later it’s got 103 views.
And it’s very hard to justify that sort of effort for such a low return on investment.
So what I’m trying to explain here,and I’m only going to go into it in a very basic detail, but it’s the idea that how you use a video-first strategy in conjunction with what I Would call micro-content.
This is the idea, this is the concept: you do the main video.Let’s say. It’s an interview with a Marbella architect.
And in that interview you discuss their background, you discuss some of the developments that they’ve worked on.
You discuss how the area of Marbella has changed over the last 25 years and you discuss what new trends there are within the architectural world in relation to luxury property.
So you do your video, you pay your chaps,or you have an in-house team or whatever the situation is,and they do the video.
Yes, you put it on your YouTube channel and now this is going to become… Think of some sort of Star Wars concept,it’s going to be your ‘mothership’.
So the big video is 30 minutes long.
The first thing that people are going to say is, no one’s going to watch a video that’s 30 minutes long.
They will.
Will you watch it if you’re not interested in architecture?
Probably not.
Will you watch it if you’re not looking to buy in Puerto Banus?
Probably not.
Will someone who’s looking to buy in that area?
Probably will.
Will someone think of hiring the architect?
Probably will. You get the picture.
And then on YouTube, what you do is you add the chapters, so people can jump around.
So they are only really interested in what the new property trends are.
They can jump to that part.
You make sure you have the subtitles or the captions.
YouTube provides these for free, just to make sure you go through it and tidy them up because they’ll get
the wrong names and they’ll be 35different versions of what Marbella is as a word, particularly with people’s names.You tidy up the captions.
Now suddenly the video actually has subtitles.
Google will ‘see’ those subtitles.
And if somebody searches for something that’s relevant to ‘new architectural trends in Marbella’, for argument’s sake.
That chapter within the video will show up in the search results.
That was an algorithm change from about a year and a half ago that Google did, where they’re looking at multimedia and they can now look at video content and bring that up as a result.
So you have a little bit of a fringe benefit there.
And then it depends on the agency, what happens next.
But let’s just use some examples.
Let’s say typical estate agency that has a blog that has several social networks and has a YouTube channel.
So that’s most of the agencies here.
So with the blog, they hire a company that writes stuff, but they never write anything interesting, nobody looks at it, and it’s just a bit of a wet weekend and everybody is wondering, what’s the point?
The SEO company tells you that you should be doing it because quality content and ‘content is king’.
And all these buzzwords from 2015,not saying it is incorrect, but anyway, so suddenly, rather than having to hire someone to look at the local newspaper and write 500 words about the new tunnel, which is not going to index particularly well, on Google, none of your buyers particularly care.
They’re certainly not going to go to your website for news.
In this case, you’ve got this 35-minute conversation with a renowned architect, with chapters,
and you’ve got three, four, five pieces of separate content that you can tidy up into a blog format or an interview format for your blog.
That’s super original content that nobody else has and that you don’t have to pay someone
to originate it, you just have to pay someone to curate it, to tidy it up.
So there’s your blog.
Then you take the some of the chapters, and the chapters then become individual videos that you can
share on LinkedIn, on Facebook if you’re on Facebook, on Instagram.
Maybe within those chapters you can get three, four or five little sound bite reels for Instagram.
Maybe you want to do a podcast, and you get an account with SoundCloud, which will then distribute your content off to Apple Podcast and Spotify.
You take that video, file, that 35 minutes chat, and you uploaded it to SoundCloud and off it goes to podcast.
But what I’m saying is that you basically got the material.
You’re not going to be posting that every single day, but you’ve got a bucket load of material.
Some of it will be lasting forever.
Not just that, but the actual person that you spoke to will then if you’ve done a good job interviewing them, and they’re pleased with the result, they will share it throughout their networks and that will expose you to their sphere of influence.
Yes, there will be some crossover,but there’ll be quite a lot that doesn’t.
And that’s a sort of reputation by association that you can’t buy.
Maybe you can buy it, but it’s expensive.
So suddenly you have this renowned architect that has a good reputation that’s been in Marbella for 35,
40 years and is sharing the conversation they had with your agency.
That’s kind of like an indirect thumbs up, it adds credibility.
And this is something that if you build
a regular, frequent content policy for doing these videos, each time you’re creating a mass of micro-content that you can use, you’re no longer just having to put new listing posts and just crap from third parties and hope that it hopes it’s going to spread.
I’m not going to go into what (social) networks you should be using and what networks you
shouldn’t be used and which ones are good for real estate and which ones aren’t.
I’m just trying to explain the concept of that investment into that video.
If you just stick it on YouTube, then it is wasted investment and it’s going to sit there because there’s one
final point to think about and that is as a modern content strategy.
And it’s a simple principle, but it’s where most people or agencies fall down, is you’ve got to create good
content that your audience, the audience that you have in mind, will consume.
So you do something really good that the people that you want to see it, see it and they like it.
So good content that your target audience will consume.
Most agencies struggle with one or two or both of those things.
Very few can do both.Why?
Because they don’t know how to distribute content.
That’s the video that goes up to YouTube.
They can figure that bit out,but there it sits.
Nothing happens with it.
So the good content,but it’s not being consumed by their target market or they don’t know what they’re doing with social networks.
And on LinkedIn they’re talking about 325 days of sunshine as if it’s B2C when in reality
they’re talking to other agents and collaborators, which doesn’t ring true.
Or they hire an external agency to do their social media and that sort of thing.
But because they’re not you and they’re not on your head and they’re not with you and they’re not in your office and they’re not with your people and they’re not at the open house and they can’t originate
decent content, but they can do a good job distributing $hit content.
Excuse my language.
So with this idea of video-first, using it as micro-content,what you have is good quality content.
Does that mean that you should get rid of the social media company that you have
at the moment that’s giving you vanilla content?
Now, if they’re good at distributing and they know what they’re talking about,you’re going to be giving them some really chunky good content to actually distribute.
And you just have to have a plan.
And that one video that you paid, indirectly or directly,you paid several hundred up to the thousands
for, it no longer just sat onYouTube gathering dust.
So that’s the general concept of video-first and then using it for micro-content.
And if you’re doing a video a month or two videos a month, which doesn’t seem like a lot, it soon builds up
and it starts gathering momentum and it’s a cumulative effect.
The main thing to remember is you have limited resources and that’d might be time and or money is: put your maximum resources into what is going to give you the most benefit and that’s going to have the longest shelf life.
So don’t put all your money on something That’s only going to be of interest for two days.
Put your money into something that’s going to have a longer term and make sure it’s core to the interest of your audience.term,
And your audience may be other agents and collaborators if you’re a listing agent that relies on those relationships.
And in many cases, it nearly always also is B2C i.e. your buyers or people that might want to rent the properties that you have.
And you need to understand where you’re most likely going to get to them and make sure that the language reflects that.
But you’re always trying to keep offering value without any cheesy straplines of content is king’ and provide value and empathy and all the BS that people like me like to share.
It’s actually genuine. Talk about something you’re an expert in to the audience that you would normally speak to, who would normally be interested in what you have to say and amplify it.
And that’s the idea.
This is a transcript from a video published on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/kqFOaFqqi3I
