The Empowered Entrepreneur

Learn how to use a simple technology to create and share videos that engage your clients and drive more sales for your real estate business. This webinar is co-hosted by a popular video software platform, Dubb, and one of Wall Street Journal’s top 150 real estate brokerages in America, Beer Home Team. Register now for your spot in this live webinar.

Are you planning on getting into real estate video marketing? Maybe you’re torn between going for it and not going for it. We’re here to tell you why you should give it a go, and of course, help you find out precisely what you need to get started and more.

As someone in the real estate industry, why should you even consider using video?

Solving Communication Inefficiencies

To start, it’s worth noting that the real estate industry inspired the formation of Dubb. Dubb founder and CEO Ruben Dua’s wife works as a real estate agent, and he has seen firsthand how she went from door-to-door, sending expired listings, networking, looking into Facebook groups, and essentially build a client list from the ground up. Ruben immediately recognized the existence of inefficiencies that are in communication systems in general, and particularly in the field of real estate.

Our goal for Dubb is to ultimately address these problems and connect people even from half a world away.

All the World is Changing

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room. Your work as a real estate agent most likely focuses on conducting face-to-face meetings with prospects and clients. But with the current socially-distant reality we are finding ourselves in, we’ve all had to make certain adjustments.

The coronavirus pandemic has significantly changed how everything operates. From schools switching to distance learning to corporate offices shifting to remote work, from casual get-togethers on FaceTime to professional business meetings over Zoom, the global crisis has turned the world upside down. Nearly every activity you could think of is done virtually nowadays.

Since we are fighting off an invisible enemy, it’s only right for us to practice extra caution when interacting with others. Therefore, physical home tours are a no-go for the foreseeable future.

Because of this, some agents now think that there isn’t a medium or platform to sell real estate. You see, unless you don’t recognize the possibilities that come with doing video, regardless of how confident you are when put in front of people, you’ll be stuck believing that there’s not much to be done.

But once you begin shifting your perspective and realize that video is the number one substitute in place of view or face-to-face meetings, you’re giving yourself a competitive advantage.

That said, some real estate agents are aware of what video can do for them. The only problem is that they don’t feel comfortable with it and haven’t yet gathered the confidence to incorporate it into their work. However, when you think about it, video and face-to-face are just about the same thing. If you’re up to meeting with prospects and clients personally, then you’re more than capable of talking to them through a camera.

Getting the Visual Experience Right

Real estate requires more of a visual experience, as the process of selling homes relies on being capable of displaying and showcasing the most intricate details. Advertisements can endorse homes or units as having “spacious” rooms able to accommodate many, but it’s often not a good idea to take their word for it, as these descriptions are not always very accurate. Even photos cannot convey the quality of lighting, roominess, and the overall atmosphere of a house, let alone textual descriptions. With video, you can take prospects on a virtual tour that’s just as effective as being in the room.

Video is Here, and It’s Here to Stay

In reality, video is not the future of business or sales or marketing. It’s already here. Video is now.

Even before the pandemic struck and shocked us forever, real estate video marketing (and video marketing in almost every other industry) was already a thing. It’s just that more brokers and agents are only now starting to take notice of its power.

Curious about the many great opportunities that video offers? Let’s talk numbers.

• 64% of property buyers are more inclined to make a purchase after watching a video
• Real estate listings that include videos receive 403% more inquiries than those without it
• Research from 2019 found that websites were the most trusted source of real estate information
• 40% of prospective buyers find virtual home tours very useful

Evidently, video is effective in attracting engagement, converting leads, and closing sales. If you’re ready to find out how you can get started with real estate video marketing, Dubb is here to help guide you through the process.

We partnered with one of Wall Street Journal’s Top 150 real estate brokerages in America to conduct a masterclass on creating and sharing videos that drive revenue for real estate businesses. We are referring to none other than the Beer Home Team, an agency based in San Diego. Co-hosted by Dubb chief revenue officer Darius Santos and Dubb founder Ruben Dua with Isacc Guzman, head of agent growth at Beer Home Team, we primarily discussed how to boost real estate sales using Dubb. Isacc’s work involves partnering with the industry’s best real estate agents and helping them build wealth through real estate sales and investment.

The Medium is the Message

Isacc is a solid proponent of video. He believes in the adage that says, “the medium is the message.” In this context of real estate marketing, the phrase denotes that regardless of how well-crafted your message is, if you’re only delivering it through an email and nobody is reading it, it’s useless.

On the other hand, no matter how ordinary or not as great your message might be, if it comes in a medium that’s effective, such as video, it would pack more punch and would have more potential in leading to better opportunities.

One of Isacc’s initial tasks as the head of agent growth at Beer Home Team was to search for a platform that they could use to embrace video marketing. Out of all the video platforms that he looked into, he ended up going with Dubb.

Beer Home Team tremendously focuses on growth and development. One of their proudest milestones happened just this 2020 when they added $89 million in volume. Their high regard for video has played a considerable part in their growth, and Dubb has served as a critical component in their video marketing efforts.

During a separate interview with Ruben, Isacc answered questions about how they’ve been leveraging Dubb at Beer Home Team for their marketing strategies. Here are some of the key insights and takeaways from that conversation:

Key Insight #1: The Secret to Growth is Engagement

Isacc shared that their firm is growing as fast as they are because they value engagement.

From a team and leadership perspective, all of their agents are incredibly engaged—this is manifested in their focus to enroll innovative ideas and new ways of approaching anything they believe would help them gain a competitive edge. Case in point, when they started integrating video into their business structure, it became nearly an internal campaign to enroll the agents to go all-in with the practice of using it and chiefly making it a work habit.

From a revenue perspective, they then taught their agents how to use the same techniques as one-to-one videos with their clients to engage and encourage them to come along on the journey. For instance, whenever they would have clients like property sellers who don’t want people inside their house out of worry caused by COVID-19, their solution would be to enroll the clients into leveraging technology and video for making sales. This way, they can still conduct their business without concern, risk, and the trouble of having to leave the house.

Key Insight #2: Video is Almost Like Being in the Room

Like we’ve already established, video is the most straightforward and most accurate alternative for in-person meetings. Now that there isn’t any other way to interact than through video, if you’re a real estate agent who’s not willing to rely on it, then you are more or less depriving yourself of the upper hand.

Real estate virtual home tours are practically like being in the actual room. They are an invaluable resource for both property buyers and sellers because video is the only medium that can showcase homes in much more detail than snapshots or written word ever could. Showing prospects around a house with a camera is nearly the same as walking with them in person.

Key Insight #3: Video is for Everybody

Isacc and his team primarily use Dubb for one-to-one videos to stay in touch with prospects and clients, regardless of which medium they initially used to contact them. They always follow up on the first interaction with one-to-one videos.

Why is video so compelling? Because it’s engaging and much easier to consume and access than any other communication medium. It effectively solves the problem of the declining state of the human attention span. People are also much more likely to retain information when presented in the form of video.

Key Insight #4: Leverage Dubb for Maximum Ease and Functionality

With Dubb, anybody can easily create high-quality videos—even those without much experience producing content with new media. You don’t need to study any video production courses or editing classes to put together a concise home view.

Now that we’re on the topic of leveraging Dubb for growth and efficiency, let’s discuss specifics.

What is Dubb?

Dubb’s purpose is to help people like you get more engagement, bookings, and sales by creating actionable videos that provide clients value. It’s the all-in-one video solution to all of your video marketing needs.

Dubb offers many powerful features that assist you in creating, distributing, and tracking your video content.

1. Video Creation and Customization

One of Dubb’s tools specifically useful for real estate agents is the mobile app. Since house tours are not possible these days, the mobile app can be your best friend for making the most effective virtual tour.

In recording a video, you can either start with the camera facing yourself or the opposite. You can pause and resume recording whenever necessary and still be able to splice those clips together when finished. If you already have a pre-recorded video file that you want to upload, you can upload that onto Dubb directly from your library. Whichever way you do it, you’re free to add text, insert emojis, and add music. You can make the video as fancy or as simple as you want it to be.

Another example of Dubb’s most handy features is the Dubb Chrome Extension. With this tool, you can create videos from scratch. Give the extension a click, and it’ll present you with several recording options to choose from.

There’s an option to record your entire screen, while at the same time, including audio and a small video feed of your webcam at the bottom corner. During recording, you can make use of the annotation tool and other real-time editing features. The annotation feature is incredibly helpful if you’re going to run contract details and real estate market updates by clients—this communicates that you care about them enough to create a video for them and know your way around the industry or the market. Compared to merely sending documents or links to real estate reports, taking the time to walk your clients through these essential bits of information provides more value to them. It wouldn’t even take much of your time—you could do this in under a minute or two. Not only that, but you’re also valuing their time by not making them read long forms of text.

You can also try out the partial screen record feature, which will only capture a specific tab of your choosing. If a webcam feed of yourself isn’t necessary for a video, you could turn it off and choose to show just your profile picture (or no profile picture at all) and record your audio.

When done recording your video, Dubb automatically packages it along with your branding elements—this works for both the desktop and mobile versions. You can place your logo, watermark, your brand colors, and a custom background image on video landing pages so that your page viewers can focus solely on your brand. Because you’re trying to engage clients and not lose their interest, it’s ideal that you make sure no other brands are competing for their attention.

Below the video, you’ll see some of the most important elements of the video page. There you’ll find the video playlist where you can strategically organize a set of videos. Soon as the prospect gets over the primary hurdle of pressing play, it’s smooth sailing from there on out. Once a video finishes playing, it will segue into the next. An example of a simple yet effective video playlist contains an introduction video, an explainer video, and a compilation of testimonial or social proof videos. If you already have professionally shot visuals of a property, you can upload those pre-recorded video files from your library onto Dubb.

To continue leading your prospects through the funnel, you can use the call-to-action (“CTA”) features to your advantage. Dubb’s fully customizable CTA buttons offer a ton of functionality. You can tweak them into buttons to book a meeting, make a phone call, open up a chat from any messaging platform, download attachments, fill out a form, and even send a testimonial video. CTAs might be the last nudge your prospects need to take a step in the right direction.

To make the experience more unique and personal, you can set up several various presets for the video page. It’s incredibly helpful when you’re communicating with specific people or a group of people from your target market. You could use the preset feature for various use cases. Maybe you want a different feel of the video landing page for every stage of the sales funnel: you can make changes for each preset to suit every funnel stage’s needs. Or maybe you want to tweak the CTA buttons for a particular client. You can do that, too. If you wish to assign specific CTAs to appear on every video page, you can toggle them as default. This way, they automatically attach to videos you subsequently create.

Aside from the CTA feature, there’s also a direct calendar integration for Calendly, Acuity Scheduler, Book Like a Boss, and HubSpot.
Customization is also possible for sending out your videos. Before you distribute them, you can add personalization text like your contacts’ names. Upon sending a video via email, it would appear as an engaging animated GIF preview of the first three seconds.

2. Video Distribution to Any Platform

Dubb has a universally compatible share-and-send feature that you can use for any platform you’re using. If your business is vastly present on social media, you can use this sending option to distribute your videos via social networking platforms. You also have the choice to download your videos and then upload them to platforms of your choice.

Besides the universal share-and-send method, Dubb has direct integration with several major CRM and email platforms (Gmail, Outlook, Mailchimp, Salesforce, HubSpot). Meaning, you can distribute your videos right from Dubb. You can also access Dubb’s features directly from these platforms; look for the Dubb icon inside of these systems, and you can access your Dubb library and its features. LinkedIn is also directly integrated with Dubb; if you’re planning on using video messaging for reaching out to LinkedIn users, all you have to do is look for the Dubb icon. You can record a video, upload a pre-recorded video, attach a video from YouTube, and even monitor your videos’ user activity (more on this later). If you’re using a CRM that doesn’t directly integrate with Dubb, you can still send your videos with the copy-for-email feature.

One more great feature for distribution: you can make Dubb do the work for you. Dubb has a marketing automation system built into it. You can create campaigns for sending out emails, text messages, and more.
You will have to put in the work upfront to create your workflows, but once that’s finished, you can sit back and allow Dubb to send bulk campaigns or automation to your contacts.

Campaigns are a sequential set of static emails sent out to contacts who signed up for any of your services or newsletters. You can schedule them for automatic sending, and their contents are predetermined. Sending bulk campaigns is a great way to follow up with leads and prospects. They drive in more engagement and response rates because they serve as prompts for your contacts to interact with your content.

Email automation, on the other hand, consists of dynamic messages that make use of triggers. Like campaigns, you can also schedule them. But the main distinction is that automation messages vary from contact to contact. The succeeding emails that prospects receive after the automation workflow starts are dependent on their activity or behavior. The triggers function as determining factors of which message to send next. These workflow triggers have corresponding messages you can create, each specific to your recipients’ possible actions. You can make your workflows as straightforward or as complicated as you need them to be.

Many CRM platforms provide campaign and automation functionality, but Dubb is one of the few that provides these functions for both text and email.

3. Tracking and Analytics Data Monitoring

We’ve briefly mentioned this earlier on. It’s time to find out what tracking and analytics are.

Tracking and analytics are valuable data that lets you know the extent of every single one of your videos’ reach. The most useful data provided for many video sharing platforms is only the number of views your video has gotten. But with Dubb, you’re not only gathering surface-level information but so much more. You can observe the number of page views, who among your contacts are clicking on your videos, how much of the videos they consume, the number of call-to-action clicks, and even emoji reaction rates.

These are very detailed analytics that gives you ideas on which type of content is most effective and which of your strategies need working on. If you’re trying to generate leads, you’d want to get every bit of information about who’s interacting with your material. Being equipped with this much intelligence helps you discover more sales and marketing opportunities.

For guides and instructions on more specific Dubb features, you can access the readily available learning center that you can find on the upper right corner of your dashboard.

Now that we’ve discussed the creation, customization, distribution, and tracking process, let’s get back to more of what Isacc has to say about real estate video marketing. Isacc was generous enough to give away several valuable tips for real estate agents.

Tip #1: Fill in Every Next Step with Video

Isacc suggests that every time you get in touch with a prospect, lead them through the next step with video.

Perhaps you can also try communicating internally within your team using one-to-one videos, just so that you can get your agents to understand and appreciate the benefits that video can generate. Eventually, start enrolling them to use the same techniques with clients, just like they do at the Beer Home Team.

If you aren’t embarrassed to show up in real life, then there’s no need to be embarrassed in front of a camera. Remember that it’s still you that you’re presenting, just in a different medium.

Ultimately, you have to recognize that providing value to clients is your first and last priority. And what better way do it than to produce unique, thoughtful, and relevant video content?

Tip #2: Make at Least Three Videos a Day

Producing multiple videos a day has been tried and tested by Isacc and his team. In under five to six minutes, each team member finished shooting three videos—they do this to start every workday with some form of outbound attempt to acquire new business. For real estate agents, creating at least three videos a day is what he recommends.

This method of prospecting is perhaps the most considerate and respectful of your clients’ time and privacy. Always value your clients’ time like you would your own. Not everyone likes being called so early in the morning for business. By producing videos that they can consume in their own time, you’re treating them with a degree of courtesy that builds foundations of trust.

Moreover, if you’re only giving calls to prospects and clients, then you’re doing it just like everybody else. Again, prospecting with video gives you an edge and makes all the difference. It’s personal, thoughtful, and it leaves your contacts with an unmatched value that no other medium can give.

Video humanizes you. It shows prospects that you’re more than an automated email or a cold call. If you’re trying to arrange an appointment with prospective clients you’ve never met before, they are more likely to show up—or at least do the courtesy of informing you that they wouldn’t be able to—if you talk to them with video. It’s not just a hypothesis; it’s a proven occurrence that has happened for Beer Home Team real estate agents countless times.

See, if you expect someone to do business with you and they have never seen you, there’s already a pre-existing issue of trust. But video is powerful enough to cross that space and connect with people no matter the distance.

Have you ever heard of parasocial relationships? They refer to social ties formed between media personas and their audience. It’s the psychological relationship that you have with your favorite characters from your favorite television shows. Even though you have never met them and only have limited interactions, you feel a strong sense of familiarity with them because you frequently have mediated encounters. And yet, it’s all virtual. Video builds trust even with strangers because of parasocial interactions.

Tip #3: Use Whiteboard Explainer Videos

One of the main difficulties for most real estate agents or any other sales and marketing employees is mastering the art of selling without sounding too salesy. It’s why Isacc recommends including whiteboard explainer videos in your playlists.

If you’ve already created and included in your playlist some personalized video with you in your suit standing in front of the camera, placing a whiteboard explainer right next to it would be a keen strategy. Whiteboard explainer videos, and explainer videos in general, get way more click-through rates than most types of videos. After watching a personalized video, contacts will likely show interest in a whiteboard explainer video because they believe it wouldn’t be another sales pitch. Keep in mind that the way you lower sales skepticism is to educate and inform. You could still put in a sales pitch at the end, but prospects would continue to watch it because they trust the format. It’s a sure win strategy that benefits both you and your audience.

Bridging Every Communication Gap

At Dubb, we are always looking for innovative solutions to improve communication. We believe in the power of human connection, and so we are continually working on ways to bridge every gap that hinders us from having meaningful exchanges.

The real estate industry is a vital component of our nation that exists to bring people together literally. And we shouldn’t just stand on the sidelines and let anything get in the way of its purpose.

We trust that Dubb will help you thrive in the real estate business despite the difficult times we are facing.

Ready to up your real estate marketing game? Try Dubb today and start unlocking unique possibilities using actionable videos.