The Value of Video for Marketing Master-Planned Communities

Utilizing video to digitally market master-planned communities is a vital method to offer prospective homebuyers greater insight into a master-planned community and its home builders. Video is a compelling way to share the community streetscape, variety of home designs, included amenities and overall vision of the community in order to build interest among potential homebuyers.

While this content provides several benefits to interested homebuyers, there is much that can be said about the incredible advantages this tactic presents for home builders and developers. About 90% of consumers say videos help them make buying decisions, meaning home builders and developers have an exceptional opportunity to influence buyers during their purchase journey.

Video content is both an advantageous strategy for marketing master-planned communities and a content format that is experiencing strong growth in popularity among consumers. Research shows that 86% of homebuyers used video to learn more about a specific community.

High-quality video marketing undeniably helps home builders and developers share the unique value of their master-planned community and offers homebuyers a deeper understanding of the community’s appeal. Here, we’ll share several important benefits of utilizing video content that make this tactic an essential part of any strategy for digitally marketing a master-planned community.

Boost Conversion Rates

Implementing a video to a website’s landing page is shown to increase conversions by 80%. This means creating high-quality videos with strong messaging is an important key to converting higher numbers of online visitors into leads. Watching an engaging video on a website as opposed to learning information from text proves to be a powerful selling tool to communicate value to homebuyers. This lead generating benefit will not only help in the ongoing success of a community, it will also greatly influence the success of the launch of a master-planned community as it builds a strong interest list of prospective homebuyers.

Increase Brand Visibility

Increasing a master-planned community’s brand visibility ties back to how well its website is optimized for search engines. When master-planned community websites rank higher in search results, this highly boosts the brand’s reach among prospective homebuyers.

Earning a higher ranking relates to how well a website engages and retains online visitors, indicated through page views and visit lengths. Incorporating appealing videos onto the website’s landing page offers a stellar opportunity to capture and sustain more online visitors for longer periods. It’s important to embed the video on a page that is already optimized for search engines with strong keywords and relevant links for best results. On average, online visitors spend 88% more time on a website with video than on those without video.

This increased attention is a surefire way to improve and enhance the website’s chances of showing up in searches and improving its overall brand visibility. Studies show that video drives increases in a website’s organic traffic by 157%!

Building Trust with Homebuyers

Video marketing is a crucial way for home builders and developers to set their brand apart to homebuyers. Every master-planned community website is similar, but video distinctly offers viewers a dynamic look into the community’s unique homes, builders, amenities and brand promise of a community.

By addressing homebuyers directly within videos, home builders establish authenticity that often leaves a lasting impression with prospective homebuyers. The more personable a home builder video is, the more likely homebuyers are to find them trustworthy and likable. This likability easily grows into a strong trust that homebuyers hold onto during their new home search.

When homebuyers put trust in home builders and developers, they are more likely to consider their master-planned community and reach out for more information, moving further down the marketing funnel.

Form Emotional Connections – Videos offer home builders the chance to share their brand story through captivating visual content. When homebuyers gain deeper insight into a home builder or master-planned community brand story, they feel a greater emotional connection. This connection is what strongly drives homebuyers to gain greater trust and interest in a community and its lifestyle offered.

Social Proof – It’s vital to showcase the connections home builders have made with current homeowners by sharing their stories. There’s no better way to share their genuine satisfaction with the master-planned community than with a video testimonial, which offers the highest level of social proof.

Video testimonials are incredibly effective as they offer highly convincing and irrefutable evidence of a home builder’s excellent customer service. Offering this content allows prospective homebuyers to both receive relevant information about the community and learn about the positive experiences of others, which only enhances their interest in the community. For home builders, sharing video testimonials easily forms a positive online reputation for their master-planned community and creates stronger credibility that homebuyers trust.

Implement Memorable Branding

Video marketing uniquely offers home builders and developers the opportunity to share content that is inherently more memorable and leaves a lasting impression. Typically, 80% of consumers recall videos they’ve watched throughout the previous month. That means when homebuyers watch these promotional videos, they’re much more likely to remember the brand’s visual content over text-based information. As more homebuyers recall the video content, they’re more likely to recognize the brand, develop greater interest and convert into a lead.

Opportunities for Shared Content – When consumers watch an engaging, interesting video, what’s the first thing they’re most likely to do next? Well, 92% of users will share that video with others! That means well-produced videos offer an opportune opening to share the master-planned community and communicate its appeal to a wider target audience of prospective homebuyers that is constantly expanding each time the video is shared.

Encourage Active Engagement with Live Videos

Live videos are highly beneficial for boosting online interaction and expanding brand reach among homebuyers. Hosting these live occasions is a fantastic way to strengthen home builder-homebuyer connections and implement regular interactive sessions with followers and prospective homebuyers.

Through this medium, viewers are encouraged to actively engage by watching in real-time and commenting questions that home builders can respond to conversationally with relevant answers. Compared to a 2.2% engagement rate received by non-live videos, live videos typically earn an engagement rate of 4.3%.

Along with consistently promoting the master-planned community, live videos allow the master-planned community to remain top-of-mind for homebuyers and creates regular opportunities for homebuyers and followers to engage with the home builder.

Save Money with Virtual Tours

By compiling photos of master-planned community model homes and creating video clips, home builders create virtual home tours for homebuyers. While virtual tours allow potential buyers to conveniently look at the community’s homes from wherever they are, this also enables builders to save money for their overall marketing budget and avoid the costs of hosting open house events and maintaining a model home that is regularly open for tours. Instead, builders encourage prospective homebuyers to take virtual tours that allows them to simulate moving throughout the house from room to room.

Incorporate Video within Omnichannel Efforts

Once videos are created to showcase the master-planned community, it’s important to place them where the content most effectively reaches prospective homebuyers. Video should be shared on the master-planned community’s website, blogs, social media pages, email newsletters and any other applicable channels used to promote the community.

To share videos effectively through social media, create a YouTube channel where new videos are posted regularly and share videos by linking to them on various social media channels such as Facebook to help improve the content’s reach.

Another method to increase the video’s spread is to embed videos within email blasts to prospective clients. Influencing prospective clients to open promotional email blasts is a tough sell, but incorporating video has profound effects. Including video within an email often leads to a 200 to 300% increase in the email’s click-through rate.

Develop Engaging Video Content with Milesbrand to Bring Your Brand to Life

Video marketing offers incredible value to home builders and developers of master-planned communities. This digital marketing strategy presents an opportunity to highly engage potential homebuyers with compelling, memorable content.

At Milesbrand, we specialize in implementing powerful strategies to set a foundation for your brand and introduce it to the right audiences. Talk to our team today to learn more about how we can help your brand utilize video content to capture attention and form stronger connections with homebuyers.