Pivot in Practice | no.5
This is the fifth edition of Pivot in Practice, Nimble.’s recurring series aimed to deliver relevant strategies and marketing solutions to help our teams get through this unprecedented season together.
Three ways to leverage video to enhance property marketing campaigns.
Over the course of the past few months, it was imperative to quickly discuss and execute impactful marketing pivots for the short-term. Inevitably though, as variables continue to arise and companies continue to contemplate new protocols and procedures to enable safe returns to office, we’d like to take the opportunity instead to focus this #PivotInPractice post on a deliberate shift towards initiatives that will add value across the long-term.
Below we’ve culled three ways to leverage video as a living tool that stretches beyond COVID-19 times in order to enhance property marketing initiatives. We hope you’ll follow along and contribute to the conversation!
1. Use a brand video to reveal your ‘why’ and anchor your credibility.
When it comes to planning for and producing an impactful first impression of your company’s brand to a virtual audience, a concise brand video has the power to set you up for success and support a more efficient, meaningful discussion.
Play Nimble.‘s Brand Video on Branding For The Built Environment® here ▷.
At Nimble., we had the pleasure of working with Southend to produce our own brand video in order to educate our audiences about what Branding For The Built Environment® really means. This video lives on our website as a first true introduction, and we frequently send it to new contacts in advance of in-person or virtual meetings.
The beauty of having this living, breathing marketing tool in your arsenal is the fact that once it’s been produced, you can extract bite sized clips to raise awareness across your social platforms, campaigns and more. Working hand-in-hand with the Southend team, if we ever needed to tweak a portion of the video, we wouldn’t have to start from scratch.
Play Transcend’s Brand Video on Elevating the Workplace here ▷.
Southend has also worked with CRE brokerage companies to help highlight their core differentiators in the market. In this example, Southend worked with Transcend CRE to produce a brand video focused on communicating a non-traditional approach to helping companies find commercial spaces that reflect their culture and inspire growth. A piece that walks the line of corporate and out the box, see how they helped this team communicate their value to clients.
If you’re interested in partnering with Southend’s talented team to build a brand video, we’d love to make an introduction!
2. Use replicable property videos to highlight tangible and intangible benefits.
Beyond simple property websites, custom tour materials and targeted e-blast campaigns that support impactful introductions to market, it can be challenging to help national and international clients grasp the tangible and intangible benefits that a property offers — the vibe, the draw, the experience. Exploring avenues for incorporating repeatable videos into your marketing arsenal to capture those benefits can be a smart approach and a great standard to set across all projects.
A few standards you might consider:
Set a Property Video Standard —
A 60-120 second property introduction in video format enables you to capture major selling points efficiently.
After our team at Nimble. designed the brand and crafted the story for TPA Group’s project District at Chamblee, BarnesCreative produced this property video to support CBRE’s leasing efforts by helping them highlight what ITP Location, OTP Convenience (the property tagline) really means for prospective tenants .
Set a Virtual Property Tour Standard —
Working with a savvy team like Barnes Creative, you might also consider adding virtual property tours to your marketing toolkit. If you’ve been following our Pivot In Practice series, you will recall we dug into a few possible avenues for virtual touring in edition four.
Whether you’re marketing one property or a full campus, setting a standard for creating an easy-to-navigate (and to replicate) tour experience, outfitted with your property branding can create long-term value. In this example, Barnes Creative utilizes a professional 360º camera and drone photography to thread together an interactive District at Chamblee campus tour. As a Google Partner, Steve also has the authority to add your virtual tour to Google so that it culls in search and on maps for increased user reach.
If you’re interested in working with BarnesCreative, we’d love to make an introduction!
3. Use augmented flythrough visualization to demonstrate possibilities.
If you have speculative work on the horizon, one great approach for building out your digital marketing toolkit is to ask your VR partner or architectural team for a spec visualization. Locally, we partner with Trick3D’s talented team of ATL-based modelers to create what they like to call “animated awesomeness”. Helping your audiences visualize what a space will look like creates an experience that feels real enough to grasp and get excited about. Spec visualization provides the flexible opportunity to show off the space as in rendering, fly-through or virtual tour format.
Before you request 3D visualization, there are a few cues we recommend preparing in advance to help the process run seamlessly:
• Have a strong idea of creative direction/sequencing, optimal timing, and end-formats [ie. if your audience is a TR broker with a 30 sec. or less attention span, know this up front]
• Clearly communicate your vision and project requirements in the form of a brief
• Be able to provide complete model supplements: FF&E specifications, a final finish plan, and [bonus points] a Dropmark or folder share of all modeling thumbnails
• Be prepared to communicate and prepare for the level of detail necessary to visualize/’sell’ [ie. if you want this experience to be holistically ‘on brand’ down to the accessories modeled and screen graphics used, provide this clarity during project budgeting –– not review cycle]
• Be mindful during the review process that you are building in the pieces of technology that will provide the most flexible showing for your end-audiences. For example, you might consider the ability to toggle on/off between open and closed ceiling or want to demonstrate both day/night views…. modeling is inherently a living marketing tool, but it does take time and technical will. Express needs early to your team so they can plan for them.
On outside of ATL projects, we’ve had great collaborations with an array of talented modelers and artists, CBRE Floored being one of them (here’s a walk-through example from our Phase One collab. at Columbia Plaza) .
Create 60-second future amenity walk-throughs—
Examples of 360º amenity walk-throughs promoted pre-construction through realization. Explore and ▷.