Creating YouTube Content for Real Estate Agents
By Mary Jackson, Sr. Operations Manager at Cook & James
This blog is a forum to curate expert commentary, opinion and thought leadership resources. In the past we’ve profiled topics like cybercrime in real estate, RESPA compliance best practices and tech trends including virtual reality. Today, Mary Jackson, our senior operations manager and marketing guru here at Cook & James, continues her series about marketing tools with insight and tips for realtors creating their own YouTube channel. (Her previous blogs have covered landing pages, YouTube in general, Facebook photo tips, and overall marketing strategies.)
Going viral or becoming YouTube famous doesn’t need to be on your goal sheet for 2021, but getting an active channel running to help boost your SEO, credibility and overall marketing tactics should be!
In this blog post, I will walk you through the most important and effective steps to take when creating your channel including choosing keywords wisely, editing and uploading video. Next time we’ll delve into how to optimize YouTube content with the most effective marketing tactics once your channel is up and running.
Create your channel for constant evaluation
YouTube is owned by Google, so the most important thing to remember is that your content is constantly being evaluated, ranked, and pushed up or down depending on your content quality and page layout.
There are a lot of small ways that you can improve your page. In my Social Media For Real Estate Agents classes, I talk a lot about the importance of establishing your brand and using proper imagery and sizing. These same rules apply to YouTube. Consistency matters. Step one is choosing a headshot or branded image that you’re (hopefully) already using across all of your social media business profiles. Step two is ensuring that you are using a size that agrees with each platform. For YouTube, those sizes break down to:
Channel Art: 256px by 1440 px
Profile: 800px by 800px
Video Thumbnail: 1280px by 720px
Keywords are important to increase views – choose wisely
You will want to do a bit of research about the topics in which your audience is most interested. For real estate agents, that could be neighborhood tour videos, home improvement tips, market information or showings.
Write out and plan your video ideas and start thinking about all of the keywords that you could use that relate to that video. You can even plug in your video title into the Google Keyword Planner (free tool) and get a list of relevant keywords to use on your video description.
By using targeted keywords, you can increase the number of organic views your video and page get. Think about that time you searched YouTube for tips on home improvement. Remember all of the subsequent, similar videos that kept popping up and playing next? That’s what we’re after. This way your content has a higher likelihood of being seen without paying for ads.
Co-created content
Since real estate agents are typically looking to be recognized as experts in their local market, think about different local businesses with whom you can create YouTube content. For example, you can create a video of your top five family-friendly restaurants in Roswell. You would tag the business profiles of the restaurants in the post when sharing the video on your social media channels, then the restaurants would see it, reciprocate and share the video onto their pages, thus giving you access to their followers.
In the end, they get recognition for having an awesome business and all parties reach a larger audience together than they would have alone. Examples of other co-created content could be teaming up with an exterminator to create a video on pest issues in homes, interviewing a local interior designer on the latest home design trends, and so on. The possibilities are endless and the more creative you are, the better you’re positioned!
Filming video and editing
Now that you know what videos you will be creating and you have a rough idea of what keywords you want to include, it’s time to film. For most people, this only involves a smartphone and a simple lapel mic, but if you’re more advanced there are dozens of tools at your disposal - lighting equipment, microphones, teleprompters, stabilizers and more. Don’t feel like you have to rush out and purchase the latest and greatest because a video is truly only as good as its content. So, better to stay focused on quality content.
Once your video is filmed and you’re happy with the outcome, it’s time to edit. Editing is an important step in the process because you want to make your video the highest possible quality and a good, positive experience for your viewer. iMovie, Windows Movie Maker and YouTube Studio are all great, free editing options that are extremely user-friendly. Also, for you to get the biggest bang, you should always remember to include calls to action (or CTAs) in the video to maximize your opportunity to get business.
Other important considerations when editing include length and images. You want to keep your videos short by removing any long pauses or unneeded gaps/errors and replace them with images – this can be especially helpful if you insert a royalty-free image where the cut is made, eliminating the awkward cut of scenes and underscoring your points. Here’s what I mean: if you’re talking about FHA loans and you have to stop and cough during a take, simply delete this portion and replace it with an image of an FHA loan program, or a happy family. See? Editing isn’t so hard!
As for that art, you can find beautiful, free images on Unsplash or create an infographic slide on Canva. Pro tip: photos about every 40 seconds can break up the “talking head” video and help decrease your bounce rate -- meaning fewer people leaving your video!
Add keywords when uploading videos
Once you upload your edited video, you will see an area to create the title and to add keywords - this is the section where all of your keyword planning will pay off! Fill that section with keywords to your heart’s content - just don’t add unnecessary or unrelated keywords thinking that it will bring you more views because it will actually have an adverse effect.
Remember to be sure to add all of your contact information to an intro or outro slide, as well as in the channel and video description so people know where to find you if they are interested in your services. This is the critical CTA I mentioned earlier.
Finally, you’ve completed all the planning, filming and editing -- the hardest part of creating your YouTube channel. Now it’s time to amplify all that hard work with ace marketing strategies and I’ll cover how to market your brand new channel in my next blog post – we’ll discuss various platforms (email and CRM systems), drip campaigns, advertising to boost your analytics and get new business leads.
Mary Jackson’s vast marketing experience and leadership skills made her the perfect fit to lead the Cook & James marketing team and she quickly excelled and was promoted to senior operations manager. She was drawn to the firm because of the culture, where she can work with other passionate, innovative and gregarious people like herself. She’s also drawn to the outdoors -- her ultimate goal is to hike through every national park which she’s working on with her husband and two dogs.
Mary leads ongoing educational opportunities for Cook & James professionals, colleagues and collaborators and has offered classes in YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, advertising, and a variety of traditional marketing strategies and techniques. Contact info@cookandjames.com for an updated schedule or to learn about bringing these classes to your office.
Thanks Stephen Monterroso for the photo! - https://unsplash.com/@stephenmont