While it may seem like the bulk of knowledge around how to create a virtual tour falls on the onsite leasing team, it’s just as important for the apartment marketing staff as well.
Part of the job of these marketing teams is to support their leasing agents at the community level. While some leasing agents may know how to make a virtual tour with an iPhone, many may not. Or, more likely, they don’t know how to create a virtual tour using the specific apartment community’s branding guidelines or even the software.
It’s incredibly important for apartment marketing staff to know how to create a virtual tour, so they can be a resource to leasing teams and help ensure they are reaching prospective residents. That way, they know the ins and outs and the value of leveraging virtual leasing tools and how they can best support their onsite teams. If apartment marketing staff understands how to create a virtual tour, they can provide the following for leasing teams:
- Guidance and support
- Insight into branding
- Marketing direction
Guidance and Support
By knowing how to create a virtual tour, marketing teams can support and guide their onsite teams. By fully understanding their virtual tour software, they can help create step-by-step guides for leasing teams on the ground. Those guides can include what type of content they want their teams creating, how the brand should be represented across these virtual tours, and how these videos should be personalized. Whether it’s how to create a virtual tour with an iPhone, or using virtual tour apps, the marketing teams can provide everything from the look and feel of the videos to the shots and lighting. All of that plays a critical part in the branding, the sentiment and look and feel of the apartment community.
These are all aspects where apartment marketing teams should be the ones leading the charge on that. They should be the ones driving forward the tutorials and the guides of how to create a virtual apartment tour. Those guides can include everything from:
- How to create a unit video tour properly (start from the corner of the living room)
- How to create an amenities overview video
- How to create a move in video
- How to create a maintenance video
These overviews will lay out those guidelines and best practices to guide the ship for their teams. Without knowing how to be a great virtual tour creator for real estate themselves, they can’t truly guide others.
Branding Oversight
Video has already grown organically for multifamily communities. The prevailing sentiment is that video is happening on the onsite level. Leasing agents are filming and becoming their own virtual tour creators. It doesn’t matter if they have the best virtual tour software or even know how to create a virtual tour. But, in terms of a marketing steam, many of these leasing agents are filming virtual tours whether or not they have the guidance from a corporate branding aspect. And for any apartment marketing professional, that should scare them a little. They should want some control, visibility and involvement in the process.
With that being said, it needs to start with the marketing team understanding how to create a virtual tour. Then, they can synthesize their thoughts around best practices, guides, and how-to’s. That helps to communicate those aspects with the onsite leasing team. In the end, they are standardizing brand usage and communicating corporate guidance and best practices.
Marketing Direction
Marketing teams have their own goals and metrics they must meet. If marketing understands the importance and how to-s for creating a virtual tour, this can help them tweak the direction of their virtual tours to meet those goals. If virtual tours aren’t working for some reason, having the insights into their creation can help the corporate marketing team to look for the reasons why and adjust where they can. The more information into what is and isn’t working for their target residents, the better. Is it a constant issue or a virtual tour equipment and software issue? Is it the way the brand is represented or where and how the video tours are used?
To make all of that easier, Realync allows corporate stakeholders to see what the onsite teams are doing. It allows corporate involvement when necessary to assign tasks, to provide feedback to see the tours – both live and pre-recorded – that the teams are working on, and see how and where they are being posted and shared. Realync gives those corporate stakeholders control into what their onsite teams are doing with virtual tours and how to better leverage them.
Get In Touch!
Close more leases, market more effectively, engage with residents and, as always, keep it real. Do you have a question or suggestion? Or want to learn more about what you read? Email us at contact@realync.com. We’d love to hear from you!
