By the Numbers: How to Maximize Your Visual Marketing ROI

This post is Part 2 of a two-part series on what the numbers say about the effectiveness of visual marketing. In Part 1, I covered three main points:

1. Quality visual content boosts selling power.
2. Buyers and Sellers Prefer visual marketing.
3. Quality visual content increases leads.

“That’s great,” I can hear you saying, “but my marketing budget is too small to use visual content in every marketing campaign.” No worries! You can make a big splash for less, simply by focusing your efforts. Here’s what the statistics say about which visual marketing choices have the biggest ROI.

Hire a Pro Whenever Possible

I covered these statistics in Part 1, but they bear repeating. Compared to DIY photos, professional photos reduce time on market by up to three weeks and boost selling price by up to $11,200. In addition, professional video is 30% more effective than DIY video as a marketing tool. So when you want to use visual marketing, find the money to hire a pro – the investment will pay for itself.

Focus on Community Videos and Home Tours

Of home buyers who use video in their search, 86% use it to research a particular community, and 70% use it to tour the inside of homes. These two uses are far and away the most popular. To top it off, community videos offer high ROI because they’re “evergreen” content you can use again and again.

So if your video budget is limited, focus on producing community videos and video house tours. Can’t afford both? Find a videographer who can produce videos that combine listings and community information. You’ll still nab the lion’s share of the video audience, but you’ll probably spend less than you would to produce both types of video separately.

Syndicate to YouTube

With a 51% audience share, YouTube is now the top video research destination for house-hunters (yes, even more popular than listing websites), so make it your default upload location for listing videos. Set up your own channel; organize videos by playlist; and use SEO-friendly titles and descriptions to help your videos rise to the top of search results.

YouTube is also a popular destination for agent videos: “find an agent” searches on YouTube are increasing 46% year-over-year. Of course, you can’t post a written bio on YouTube – you’ll need a video bio to capture that audience.

Video bios can run from the very simple to the elaborate, with prices to match. Something simple will get your name on YouTube, which is the most important step, but a more polished video will probably garner more views and shares.

Share, Share, Share

SEO experts generally agree that you’re more likely to get found online if you use video on your website and social media. And video can double engagement on Facebook, which has awesome capabilities for native video and video advertising.

Uploading video to Facebook can sound intimidating, but it’s actually pretty simple. If your video is already on YouTube, you can just paste the link into a Facebook post, and the video will embed automatically. Need a little more help? Check out these easy video tutorials on the HouseLens website.

However you go about visual marketing, just get started. As the numbers show, you can’t afford not to!