With all the impressive statistics around the power of video marketing, leading real estate franchises such as Coldwell Banker and Century 21 have been investing in video solutions to empower their agents. Although video creation among real estate agents is still on the rise, early feedback from agents and brands paints an interesting story about how video today is helping them beyond the known search engine optimization (SEO) and viewership stats. Their video efforts are helping agents differentiate themselves through making an emotional connection to their audience in a way that is particularly special to video.
Joesef Jackson, a Century 21 ABC Hometown Realty agent from San Luis Obispo, California, is one of those agents seeing business gains from his video efforts. “I started doing video because I wanted to humanize the digital process,” Jackson says. His market is a destination location, and customers frequently seek out information on his community online.
Creating listing videos for Jackson has been a way to establish his credibility as someone who is knowledgeable about the marketplace. Jackson uses video to combine an on-camera message with shots of his properties and the community. The on-camera portion allows him to put a face with his marketing emails and show his audience that they can look forward to working with him personally.
Connecting personally to buyers and sellers is also a theme for Coldwell Banker King Thompson agent Danielle Alexander of New Albany, Ohio. In a recent video, Thompson told the story of a new real estate development where the builder originally purchased the land from her grandparents.
Sharing this personal side of her listing helped Alexander create an engaging video and connect with her audience. From her experience, video can make a difference to help sell listings, Alexander says. Because her videos showcase her on camera, she’s also able to stand out from other agents and get more listings as a result. In fact, a recent video she created directly resulted in her securing two new listings.
Alexander is not the only Coldwell Banker agent who is seeing success in their business by using video. According to David Marine, vice president of brand engagement at Coldwell Banker, there was a 50 percent increase in videos made by Coldwell Banker agents this past year, which Marine sees as a measure of the value that agents are seeing from the videos they create.
Century 21 is seeing a major audience growth benefit from video. Mike Callaghan, vice president of brand marketing at Century 21, says “YouTube is in the top three of our social referral traffic drivers back to century21.com,” and, therefore, Century 21 has made video “a core element in our marketing.”
Matt Singer is the founder and CEO of Videolicious, a new way for real estate agents to create their own professional-quality listing videos, automatically, in seconds. Prior to founding Videolicious, Singer sold over 500,000 products through QVC, the TV shopping channel. He was impressed with the power of video to dramatically drive sales and started asking the question, “Why doesn’t everyone use video to grow their business?” The answer was that video is expensive, challenging and time consuming to create. Videolicious aims to solve that problem by making high-quality video creation automatic, easy and fun.