One critical mistake apartment marketers make is focusing all of their effort and budget into simply getting attention.
Getting attention—or more specifically, increasing the traffic flow to your apartment community's website—is obviously important. But all of the traffic in the world does no good if those visitors are also leaving your website immediately. That’s why Time on Site is a key website metric for apartment marketers.
In order to generate more leads and, ultimately, more leases, you need to offer high-quality marketing content that gets and keeps a prospective resident's attention. Why? Allowing them to fully engage with your apartments increases the likelihood that they'll actually convert from a lead to a resident.
Apartment video tours can have a big impact because they have an unparalleled ability to attract and keep a prospective resident's attention. Letting them see inside their future home gives them more confidence to make the expensive, life-changing decision of renting an apartment. That's what we'll focus on in this blog.
Apartment Video Tours Engage Prospects In Three Important Ways
1. Video tours qualify leads.
If a prospective resident contacts you after having viewed a video tour of one of your units or amenities, it means their interest level is high and they are more ready to rent than just the average lead. This is what you want. You got their attention by directing them to your community's website (through either paid search or cost-per-click digital advertisements), and then kept their attention by letting them see exactly what you have to offer.
2. Video tours disqualify leads.
Why would this be important? After all, don't you want more leads? At the end of the day, it's not just about gaining leads—it's about gaining more signed leases. One undervalued function of video tours is that they keep many people who will never sign a lease with you from wasting any of your time. Having to deal with fewer disqualified leads opens up more time for your leasing staff to sell and close with those better prospects.
3. Video tours consistently close more leases.
Video tours are your best marketing weapon, and when leveraged correctly, have an impact before, during, and after in-person showings. We have the data to prove it in our next section.
The Effectiveness of Apartment Video Tours
Walkthrough video tours are one of RentVision's most important and popular marketing solutions. In February 2021, we ran a study of our client's data to measure the effectiveness of their walkthrough videos, and this is what we found:
Website pages with video tours had 2.5x as many views as pages without them.
During a 30-day period, floorplan pages with videos averaged 345 visits, while pages without video averaged 134. (See the Data on Video Views)
Apartment videos not only produced more page views, they also kept visitors engaged for a longer period of time.
The average duration of a RentVision walkthrough video is 2 minutes, 25 seconds. In our study, we observed that the Time On Site (or Average Session Duration in Google Analytics) for pages with video tours was 2:22—98% of the average video length. Pages without videos, meanwhile, had an average Time On Site of 1:15. Clearly, prospective residents are watching the videos. (See the Data on Video Engagement)
One client of ours was able to lease 66% more units in a single month using video tours.
Apartment videos make things easier for both prospective residents and your leasing staff. Prospects would much rather watch a 2-3 minute video than set aside hours of their time to drive to your apartment community and see it in person. If they watch a video and decide that your community isn't what they're looking for, that also helps your leasing staff. When your marketing improves the quality of the leads instead of increasing the quantity of them, your team can operate more efficiently. This was how one client of ours witnessed the power of having video tours when it increased its leasing velocity by 66% in a single month. The best part was that they managed to achieve this without having their leasing agents work more hours.
Conclusion
Getting attention for your apartment community is important, but in order to sign more leases, you need to make sure your marketing also keeps attention.
Apartment video tours, as the data shows, are extremely powerful in keeping prospective residents more engaged with your communities. After all, we know they rely on high-quality content like these videos to decide whether or not to contact you.
To learn more about the power of apartment video tours, as well as how to choose the right ones for your communities, download our free ebook, The Essential Guide to Apartment Video Tours, today.