How Real Estate Agent Dominate local community by YouTube

Low cost but powerful method to boost you real estate business

1. Introduction

To rock in real estate industry, you need to build up your credibility and influence. Getting people to know you is the first step to succeed.

The more people see you, the more they trust you.

Sustainably exposing yourself to the public or among your community is a great way to build up your credibility. A traditional way is door knocking. Meeting people one by one is a good way to build relationships. Yet the method is slow and not scalable, we use social media network.

YouTube has 2 billion users worldwide (Statista, 2019). Statista gives us information about the most popular social networks worldwide as of April 2019 and the number of active users they have on a monthly basis. The only social network that has more monthly active users than YouTube is Facebook.

Unlike Facebook, the only media YouTube accepts is video. Video is way more engaging media than text or still images, yet it is more expensive to produce.

Today, we will introduce some low cost but effective method for real estate agents to build their influence across the network.

2. Lead generation on YouTube by organic reach

Storyline

When you build a channel that people want to subscribe to, your videos need to be:

a. informational

b. interesting

c. instructional

Below is a list of topics you could start with your brainstorming.

A screenshot of a cell phone Description automatically generated

Gear to use

It’s always a good idea to start in a lean way. You don’t need fancy and high end shooting equipment. You can begin to shoot your videos by using your smartphone or iPad.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DuZBwMqp_3Y/maxresdefault.jpg

Gears for YouTube

Karin at YouTubeforAgents.com suggested a list of gears, but she said “I started with the $20 microphone, my iPad and a 20-year-old tripod, and a set of cheap lights. I upped my game over time – and as I closed deals!”

Video Editing

Once you have the video footage, you need to trim and add a special effect or transition animation. If you are not good at video editing, you could consider hiring a professional on Fiverr.com.

Before posting your video onto your own YouTube channel, make sure you follow the tips below:

Make videos about topics people are searching for
Rank your videos on Google
Boost your click-through rate with a compelling title
Create an eye-catching thumbnail
Write an enticing description
Get more suggested views by leveraging series playlists
Embed your videos on forums that get traffic
Embed your videos in relevant blog posts
Use end screens and cards
Grab “key moments” in Google by adding timestamps
Publish videos at the best time for your audience
Add relevant YouTube tags

3. Faster ways to gain traction from your targeted audience – placing YouTube ads

Apart from organic ways to reach people, we can use YouTube ads to target a specific audience. In YouTube, you could target by:

Affinity audience
Similar audience
In-market audience
Custom intent
Topics
Keywords
Video & channel placements
Website & video remarketing

You could use Facebook to advertise to people’s interests while you can advertise on YouTube by people’s intent.

People visit YouTube because they want:

To Know
To Do
To Buy

So, when you are planning a video on YouTube ads, you need a shorter video with a clear objective to match the audience’s intent.

As YouTube is the world’s 2^nd largest search engine, the YouTube search bar is a very useful tool for brainstorming keywords and video topics idea.

First, you need to brainstorm the following keywords:

Want to know keywords
Want to do keywords
Want to buy keywords

Type in the brainstorm results in the search bar, the auto-suggest function of the search bar would produce relevant search results by other searchers. Write down the most relevant topic idea.

a. Ads formats

In YouTube, there are 3 main types of ads: TrueView, Preroll, and Bumpers.

“True View” video ad

Advertisers only pay when a user watches the ad for at least 30 seconds or until the end of the video or if the viewer takes an action, such as clicking on a call-to-action. YouTube requires that skippable TrueView ads be between 12 seconds and 6 minutes in length and that non-skippable TrueView ads be 15-20 seconds in length.

There are two types of TrueView ads: Discovery ads and in-stream ads.

Discovery ads show up on the YouTube homepage, search results pages, and as related videos on YouTube video watch pages.

These ads appeared after performing a YouTube search:

Two TrueView Video Discovery Ads in a YouTube search result

This display ad appears as a related video on the right-hand video sidebar:

TrueView In-Display ad in YouTube's related videos sidebar

Once a user clicks on the ad, the destination video page features a spot on the right-hand column where a companion banner display ad will appear.

In-stream ads

TrueView in-stream ads play before someone watches the video they’ve selected on YouTube. Viewers sometimes have the option to skip the ad after watching it for five seconds.

TrueView In-Stream video ad by Grammarly

Preroll ads

Some in-stream ads are non-skippable and can play before, mid-roll, or after the main video. These are called Preroll ads, and they can be 15 to 20 seconds in duration.

Here’s an example of a non-skippable video ad before the main content on YouTube:

Preroll ad on YouTube with "non-skippable" features highlighted in the video

Bumpers

Bumpers are the third and shortest type of YouTube video ad available to you. At just six seconds per bumper, these ad spots play before a viewer’s chosen video.

b. Ads Video Creation

Tom breeze from viewability suggests a model for YouTube ads video creation.

7 step script formula – ADUCATE

Aim – connect to viewers aim
Difficulty – describing difficulty for people
Understand – build a bond with you because you understand customer
Credibility – build up credibility to position yourself as a credible source
Action plan – A within 3 steps manageable plan
Teach – value and demonstrating really good value
Exit – Call to action

c. Building ads campaign

Once you finish your video ads editing, you could then set up your ads in Google Ads platform.

Build a video campaign by:

Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.
- Select Video as format
- Select Custom video campaign / ad sequence
- In Networks setting, turn off YouTube search results and video partners on the Display Network
- For Bidding strategy, use Maximum CPV
- For Frequency capping, set cap impression frequency to 3 per week or 1 per day

– Add ad groups

Granularity is good for us to measure the performance of individual keywords. We could separate the ad groups as follows:

Naming different Ads by the brainstormed keyword – 1 keyword per ad group
Set Bidding cap to about $0.05 CPV (cost per view)
Set preferred Demographic of your targeted audience
In Keywords section, add your related keywords

– Add video ad

Here is the place we upload our creative. We prefer:

In-stream ad
Adding proper Call to action
Upload image as thumbnails 300 x 60 (design the thumbnails on Canva)
Name the ads for better measurement later, e.g. intro, video ad 1, video ad 2

4. Conclusion

Most of the real estate advertisement is still in the form of text and still images. Though photos are taken by professional photographer, the impact is limited.

The best way Real estate agents connecting customers is to use video. By exposing yourself in front of the customers, your image is being built from time to time.

Starting from 0 budget, you could gain experience on video advertising. When you feel confident, you could film better ads and invest on YouTube Ads.