The hardest challenge in content marketing is providing quality content that meets consumer needs and interests. Real estate agencies and marketers now have some help: Say It Visually’s Real Estate Explanations Library, a collection of more than 100 short videos from the company’s licensing subsidiary, Fast Forward Stories. The new library addresses a broad range of questions for real estate consumers, while giving real estate agents and marketers low-cost, ready-to-share video content with their own branding and information.
"Engaging the new digital buyers with branded content that's fresh and helpful is the number one challenge marketers face," said Matthew Dunn, chief explainer for Say It Visually. "Video is the best option, but the hardest to do well."
Content and inbound marketing are rapidly entering the mainstream as enabled digital consumers bypass conventional advertising for content that more effectively addresses their needs. A DemandMetric study reports that content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing, while generating three times as many leads. Video content, in particular, can raise e-mail click-through rates by 200 percent to 300 percent.
The Real Estate Explanations Library explains more than 50 real estate concepts in informal videos averaging under one minute, the ideal duration to engage consumers on desktop and mobile devices. The library is offered in English and a separate Spanish-captioned matching set. There are 104 videos available for immediate licensing, with another 50 in production for release before the end of the year.
Expert blending of story and visual communications in the video library make important concepts accessible to a wide range of buyers who might otherwise be vulnerable to missing key information. For example, a realtor in Florida reported using the Spanish language Fast Forward videos for his Spanish-speaking clientele:
"A couple was considering a house, and when I showed the husband our Spanish-language Fast Forward video on closing costs, he lit up like a Christmas tree,” said Ken Harris of Welcome Center Realty in Port St. Lucie. “It clarified things that would have been hard for him to follow if I'd just explained them in English. It sealed the deal.”
Fast Forward Stories combines licensing, rebranding and video hosting into a content service, much like the "Software as a Service" option championed by SalesForce and similar companies. Licensees can use the video content in many ways: sharing and posting on social media; embedding on a web site; for in-office Q&A; and sending single videos via email or text. A local real-estate agency could post a new video on its Facebook and LinkedIn pages every week for a year without repeating content.
"A custom video library of this quality and scope would be out of reach for all but the largest marketing budget," said Dunn. "This approach lets us offer the kind of top-tier explanation videos our studio has created for Fortune 100 and global companies, to smaller location-based businesses. As far as we know, nobody has ever offered a video content service like Fast Forward Stories before."
