Although we are well underway in The Digital Age, digital marketing continues to evolve each year as techniques are tested, refined, and utilized successfully. Yet trends repeatedly demonstrate that 21st century audiences favor one medium above the rest: video. Statistics show that YouTube has hit 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users, which accounts for nearly one-third of total Internet users. In fact, more than 500 million hours of video are watched on YouTube each day, and 45 percent of Internet users watch more than one hour of Facebook videos a week. All these statistics really add up, especially when you consider that more video content is uploaded to the Internet every 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in the last 30 years.
A staggering 87 percent of online marketers use video content in their strategy, and now buzz—along with video content—is saturating the rental market. Even though investing in video production is far from inexpensive, the return on investment can be exponential. 76 percent of businesses have said that video provides a worthwhile ROI, and with video projected to claim more than 80 percent of all web traffic by 2019, it’s about time you became serious about your video marketing strategy. Here are a few ways video will help you appeal to next generation renters.
Become the Authority by Fostering Trust
Video effectively allows you to take the reins and establish yourself as an authority in a fast-moving industry. It provides prospects with visual documentation regarding your product—aka your apartment community—and fosters trust in your brand.
There’s no denying that trust is the foundation of conversion, and luckily enough for digital marketers, video content marketing possesses the ability to build and nurture long term relationships due to its focus on communicating with customers and prospects instead of selling. With video content marketing, the idea is to create content that will support your business, educate the consumer, and allow you to stand out among your competitors as an authority in your industry. Creating high-impact content has proven valuable to promote customer engagement, advocate brand awareness, and enhance your online presence.
More than any other medium, video keeps potential residents engaged. Research shows that our brains process visual information almost 60,000 times faster than plain text. Not only can we process the information in videos more quickly, but we are much more likely to remember the video content we consume. Visual mediums such as video also increase people’s willingness to consume content by nearly 80 percent. By investing in video content, you’ll capture the attention of potential leads ten-fold, allowing you the chance to build solid, honest relationships with prospects that are based around information sharing, regular communication, and the trustworthy image of your brand.
Find Your Place on Multiple Devices
You’ve heard us discuss it before on MultiFamily Tech Trends, but responsive design matters! If your website has responsive design, it means that it adjusts when viewed on different devices. Got a smartphone? A widescreen desktop monitor? Something in between like a tablet? If you’re like most users then you probably browse the web on more than one of these devices. Responsive design is an approach to building your website that allows it to display and function well on any device.
Having video content that is fit for consumption on every device is a must-have in the modern market. Prospects that engage with your content want it to be user-friendly, and this is especially true for the next generation of renters. Believe it or not, a recent study illustrated that Gen-Z—a generation you must hone in on as they continue to dominate the rental market—multitasks across at least five screens a day. So, with screen time being spread across multiple devices and screen sizes, video will ensure that your message is reaching prospects and propelling them towards signing a lease with your apartment community.
Feed the Almighty Google Machine
It’s no secret that video marketing can boost your website’s SEO. When it comes to ranking, Google prioritizes sites with top-notch, relevant content as opposed to one’s without; therefore, with a video marketing strategy, you will ultimately drive more traffic to your website. Video is actually 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks in Google when compared with plain text.
Another interesting fact: Google owns YouTube. Because of this, the search engine gives well-optimized video content a boost in ranking as well. Video tags can be indexed in Google search just like written text, providing you with yet another piece of metadata that makes your marketing website more searchable overall.
Go Viral with Your Video Content
Between Snapchat, Facebook, and YouTube, there are 22 billion daily video views—so it is safe to say that Internet users are no strangers to watching videos—and plenty of them. When you create your own video content, create it to be sharable from the get-go: keep it brief, trigger the viewer’s emotions, and tell a story that’s worth sharing.
Over the past two years, visual storytelling, or communicating information through simple videos, graphics, and illustrations, has become a popular method of content marketing. It is a powerful way to break through clutter, capture the attention of your consumer, compose a narrative that resonates with your audience, and persuade them to act. Stories grant us with the ability to extract meaning and make personal connections with the presented material.
Once you create sharable material, your audience will do the marketing for you—up to 92 percent of mobile consumers sharing videos with others. After all, social video generates 1200 percent more shares than images and text combined. The benefit for you? All the likes and re-shares can potentially build valuable backlinks to your social media brand pages as well as your marketing website.
It’s time to wake up and utilize content marketing’s golden child, video, to your advantage. Video marketing allows you to establish yourself as an industry authority and foster a healthy, trustworthy relationship with your prospects and residents. It also showcases functionality across multiple devices, boosts SEO, and creates sharable content that spreads your brand message to all the nooks and crannies of the web.