With advancements in technology, there are countless ways businesses can enhance their marketing strategies today. The real estate industry particularly can benefit from the many readily available digital marketing tools. As many real estate businesses still use traditional marketing methods, you can easily gain an edge and stand out amongst your competition by advancing your digital marketing effort to appeal to today’s generation of buyers.
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Increasing brand awareness, creating a well-designed functional website, and having a social media presence are powerful ways to market your real estate business. However, another digital trend that is becoming increasingly popular amongst marketers that can really help your business stand out is virtual reality (VR).
As real estate centers around showing off spaces, VR is an extremely useful marketing tool because it enhances the “walkthrough” experience by making it more convenient and easier for buyers to visualize a space when they can’t be there in person. And there is more to VR than virtual tours. There are many ways marketers can use VR to appeal to buyers and sellers and improve their overall digital marketing strategy.
Understanding VR From a Marketing Perspective
To understand how virtual reality can be a useful marketing tool, it first helps to understand what it is exactly. You’ve likely heard of it, but have you truly been able to experience all that VR has to offer?
Essentially, virtual reality is a simulation of a space within a digital, virtual realm. These simulations can be replicas of spaces that exist today, like an art museum or a home, or they can be entirely fabricated worlds like those that exist inside video games and movies. We can see and interact with these spaces by using devices like VR headsets and goggles that enable us to feel as if we are actually standing right there, seeing and hearing what someone would see if they were physically in that place.
This immersive, interactive experience allows marketers to engage with their customers and target audiences in a whole new way. For example, the automotive industry is using it to sell cars by enabling people to “test drive” their vehicles through VR applications, and IKEA has created a VR app that allows people to shop their stores virtually and visualize the furniture in their own homes.
From a real estate perspective, this means you can enable buyers to not only virtually walk through a home, but you can even use VR to virtually stage a home for a seller, or buyers can make their own furniture selections to see how they would look in the space. The possibilities with VR and its applications in real estate aren’t endless, but it does have a lot to offer and will likely continue to grow as we see more and more advancements in tech.
How You Can Use VR to Enhance Your Real Estate Marketing and Business
VR is no longer only for fun and entertainment; there are so many practical uses for it today, especially within digital marketing. In any industry, real estate included, marketing is all about appealing to the customer and showing off your product or service as best as you can. With VR, real estate businesses can wow both sellers and buyers and enable them to visualize a space in a way that they never have before.
VR opens up a whole new avenue of marketing opportunities, allowing real estate businesses to expand and appeal to a whole new generation of buyers. Some of the most innovative applications of VR in real estate today include:
3D Virtual Tours
Allowing buyers to virtually tour a property from a remote location makes the process of marketing and selling a home so much more convenient. Previously, if a potential buyer couldn’t see a property in person, they had to rely on photographs and blueprint layouts, making it more challenging to make a sale. Now, with VR, buyers can see and interact with a property as if they are there, making the experience much more engaging and visceral.
Virtual Staging
As any real estate professional will tell you, staging a home is key to making it look just right to appeal to potential buyers. However, staging a home or commercial property takes time and effort and costs money. With VR, you can easily stage any property exactly the way you want in little time and at a fraction of the cost as it is much less labor-intensive.
Pre-Build Visualization
If you think selling a home is hard, try marketing a property that isn’t entirely constructed yet. There are many situations in which a real estate business would want to market and sell a property before it is built. However, not everyone has the best imagination making selling uncompleted properties challenging. Thankfully, VR solves this issue by enabling buyers to fully see and experience the property before construction has finished.
Virtual Instruction Guides
Often, the real estate agent or business that is marketing and selling a property is not the person who shows the property off to potential buyers. With VR, you can ensure that whoever is doing the walkthrough has all of the instructions they need to thoroughly answer buyer questions. For example, if a buyer wants to know how the HVAC system in a home works or how to access the attic, you can provide virtual instructions and guides, so the agent doesn’t leave the buyers’ questions unanswered.
Virtual Shopping
Just as VR allows you to stage a property, it also allows buyers to choose their own items to better visualize the property to their liking. Virtual commerce stores enable buyers to shop for things like curtains, decor, and furniture and place them in the virtual home space to see what they would look like, and they can even make purchases right in the virtual store app.
Digital Marketing, VR, and Real Estate
In today’s market, you’ve got to have a savvy approach to digital marketing if you want to appeal to newer and younger generations of buyers. Digital marketing is simply a must, and keeping up with the latest trends, like VR, can help you stay ahead of the competition and remain relevant to continue to grow and expand your business.
It’s especially important to have a way to measure your performance when it comes to marketing to see where you are succeeding and where you can make improvements. Virtual reality is another way for real estate businesses to maximize and measure their productivity and success. The more digital marketing applications you use, the more data you will have to work with to analyze and optimize your marketing productivity.
Final Thoughts
If you are looking for ways to improve and grow your real estate business, virtual reality is something you should highly consider adding to your marketing strategy. It allows you to expand your reach to buyers in locations across the globe, create beautifully staged properties with ease, and so much more. VR opens a whole new realm of possibilities for any industry, but especially for those in real estate.