When it comes to building your personal brand as a real estate agent, content marketing is important, but photography and videography are essential. People want to see your face, hear your voice, and get their own first impression of you—all before ever meeting you face-to-face.

Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to strengthen your reputation and get your business in front of new customers. As more and more people have learned to rely on the internet and smartphones to perform daily tasks, communicate with people, and educate themselves, video has become increasingly popular.

Consider the following statistics on the impact and importance of video, shared in a blog post by Insivia:

• 147 MM Americans watch video on the internet.  
• The average user is exposed to an average 32.3 videos in a month.
• After watching a video, 64% of users are more likely to buy a product online.
• YouTube users watch more than 3 billion hours of video per month.
• Including a video on your homepage can increase conversion rates by 20% or more.

Video marketing is an important opportunity that you can’t ignore as a real estate agent. If you want to grow your business, connect and interact with more leads online, and build a stronger personal brand that differentiates you from local competitors, you have to invest in video.

This beginner’s guide will give you the information, tools, and resources needed to get started.

Types of Video You Could Be Creating

Before you dive head first into investing in video marketing to promote and grow your real estate business, it’s important to first think about which types of videos you want to make for your audience. For example, you could dedicate time to making:

• Property Tour Videos: Extensive video tours that offer behind-the-scene looks at your latest properties in an effort to attract new leads.

• Real Estate Q&A Videos: Quick videos where you ask your social media followers to ask you questions about the homebuying process and answer them on video (recorded ahead of time or in real-time using tools like Snapchat or Facebook Live).

• Community Spotlight Videos: Video tours of the cities and neighborhoods where you sell homes that feature different businesses and attractions in an effort to connect with more potential customers.

• Customer Story Videos: Short, informal videos of past happy customers talking about their experience buying a home and working with you.

• Industry Education Videos: A video series where you educate your audience on different industry trends (like smart home technology, first-time homebuyer loans, the closing process, etc).

• Quick Tip Videos: 20-second videos that offer super short tips for people thinking about buying or selling their home.

• Niche-Buyer Videos: Videos that are intended for a specific audience, such as first-time homebuyers, downsizers, millennials, etc.

The type of videos you end up creating will ultimately depend on the audience you’re trying to reach. As such, it’s important to spend time thinking about who your ideal client is, what questions they have, and how you can help. Doing so will help ensure that you’re always focused on making videos that serve and help your clients.

Video Marketing for Real Estate Best Practices

Before creating your first video, it’s also helpful to familiarize yourself with the following best practices:

• Be real, don’t be cheesy. Cheesiness comes across very clearly on video. If you decide to invest in video as a way to market your business, you have to come across as a genuine, caring human being on video. In other words, don’t sell to people—just have a conversation with them.

• Be professional, but be informal. The videos you create will shape your personal brand and reputation, so it’s important that you keep things relatively professional. Dress appropriately, communicate appropriately, and make videos that your grandparents could watch and be proud of. That all being said, it’s important not to be overly-professional. Remember: your goal should be informal and conversational. You want people to feel like it would be comfortable talking to you and working with you.  

• Focus on your customer, not yourself. When you’re the main subject of a video, it can be tempting to make it all about you, especially when you’re talking about something you’re passionate about. But the best videos you create will be the ones that focus on your customer and the value you can provide to them, not the ones where you talk too much about yourself or your business.

• Keep videos relatively short. People don’t have long attention spans when it comes to video, especially when they are watching from their smartphones. For best results, keep most of your videos under two minutes. Property tours can be longer, but no more than five minutes max.

• When you can, invest in better equipment. When you’re first getting started, you can use your iPhone or Android smartphone to record your videos, but if you find that your audience responds well to your videos, make a plan to eventually start investing in better equipment (such as a tripod, wireless mic, better camera, etc).

• Don’t be afraid to try something new. Don’t be afraid to think about and test out new video concepts for your real estate business. Every audience is different. It may take you testing a few different types of videos until you land on one that really clicks with your ideal client.

• Let your personality shine. Remember, the videos you create will often serve as your first impression for a lot of people. As such, it’s important to let your personality shine in order to help people get a better understanding of who you are, why you do what you do, how you can help them, and why they should work with you and not one of your competitors.

• Be enthusiastic, but not cheesy. If you’re not used to being on video, it may take you a while to become comfortable on camera. The best thing you can do is be as enthusiastic as possible, without coming across as cheesy. Enthusiasm will help your audience recognize your personality faster, and will likely make them more excited to work with you over someone else.

Tools You Can Use

There are a number of tools you can use to create, edit, and share videos for your real estate business. Here are a few recommendations for beginners:

For Recording Video: iPhone, Android, GoPro, or a nicer camera if you have one or can invest in one.

For Editing Video on iPhone: Splice or iMovie

For Editing Video on Android: Magisto or VivaVideo

For Editing Video on a Computer: iMovie or FinalCut Pro

For Holding Your Smartphone or GoPro in Place: The Foneso Monopod (also works as a selfie stick for property tours)

For Publishing Video: YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Snapchat, or Brightcove

For Sharing Video: Buffer

Getting Started: First Steps

When you’re finally feeling ready to start investing in video as a way to promote your real estate business and connect with new clients, consider taking the following first steps:

• Step 1: Set your goals. The first step you should take is to set a few goals. It’s important to decide why you’re investing in video marketing and what you want to get out of it. For example, do you want to differentiate from competitors in your local area? Do you want to drive more engagement on your social media pages? Are you looking to get new leads from your video? From there, work backwards and think about what you need to achieve to get there. For example, if your goal is to drive more engagement on your social media pages using video, you might set a goal of publishing 1 new video each week.

• Step 2: Set your budget.  The second step you should take is it set your budget. You should decide how much money you can invest in producing videos—i.e. how much can you spend on equipment and software. You should also think about the time investment you’re willing to put into video marketing. From start to finish, video can take a lot of time, especially when you’re doing everything yourself. Try to carve out a consistent amount of time each day, week, or month to spend on video and stick with it.

• Step 3: Gather your equipment. Once you’ve decided on your budget, gather and ready your equipment for making your first video. For some, this will be as simple as making sure their iPhone is charged and has enough storage space available for a high-quality video. For others, it might mean purchasing a new camera, tripod, mic, and other video accessories.

• Step 4: Decide on 1-2 video types. Review the list above and decide on 1-2 video types that you can test first. If you try to do too many in a short amount of time, chances are you’ll end up overwhelming yourself and giving up on video all together. Start small by focusing on one type of video and see how your audience responds.

• Step 5: Dive in! In order for video marketing to work , you really have to go all in. You can’t get to it when you have extra time—you have to be fully invested and consistent in order to ultimately see any sort of ROI. 

Additional Learning Resources

If you want to learn more about video marketing and how to use it to grow your business, explore these helpful resources:

• 10 Must-Read Blog Posts for Video Marketing Beginners from Grasshopper
• The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing from Hubspot
• The No Hype Guide To Video Marketing on YouTube from Convince and Convert

How are you using video to grow your real estate business? Tell us in the comments below!