When Social Media Goes Bad

How to minimize the damage and bounce back when your Brand is ‘Not Liked’ on Social Media.


Social Media is great. It puts businesses in direct contact with millions of prospects and customers, worldwide. It strengthens the brand presence on the web and helps in viral marketing. The good word about a business can spread real fast on Social Media Networks. But, what happens when there’s a bad word? It can spread even faster. In this issue we put forth some tips that you can use to contain the damage when your brand is getting beat up on the web.


Analyze: There are times when the business really makes a mistakes and times when there’s a misunderstanding or mistake on the part of the customer. Analyze the situation and understand in which category it falls. If the business is at fault, make amends; make them publicly on the same medium that the irate customer used. However, if the situation falls in the latter category, speak up for your brand and make your stance clear. That way you present your side of the story to others.


Don’t Whine: So someone gave you a bad review. Be calm and collected. Don’t whine in response. Whining and mud-slinging at the reviewer will present your brand as rather immature and even give the impression that you did really mess up.


Timely Response: Respond to negative comments promptly. Ideally, the response time is less than an hour because of the viral nature of Social Media Networks.


Respond Right: While timely response is essential, a wrong response written in a hurry can be catastrophic. Refer to step one—analyze, know the facts and then respond. Be clear and on-to the point.


Be a Person: Personal touch is an important element of social Media Marketing. Bring it into your interaction when responding to negative comments. Respond as a person, not as a company. This brings in the element of accountability to your words.


Too many times one bad review can spur an epidemic of bad remarks with many people joining-in on the conversation with a “Me too!” The aim should be to arrest such unpleasant developments before it begins to erode the brand value online.

For more information visit http://www.newplans.com/ or e-mail at support@newplans.com

5 Ways To Building Better Customer Relationship

Having good client relations is important for your brand value and for revenue. Here are a few simple steps that you can take to improve them.

Personalize: Gather all information about your customers and develop a personalized communication approach towards them. Make sure the messages you send are relevant and add value to your customers.

Stay in touch: Cross selling and up-selling is great, but it is even better to stay in touch with your customers for no reason at all. You can do so by sending them greetings for during holidays and other special days like birthdays. It sends the message across that you really care about them, and that they are not just another name on your marketing database.

Accommodate: All businesses have policies, and they are needed to keep the business functioning smoothly. However, sometimes it helps to walk that extra mile and bend the policy a little bit to for the benefit of its customers. Suppose you have a return policy of 10 days, but your regular customer walks in on the 12^th day with a request for a replacement, try to accommodate them. A little step can go a long way in such cases. Not only will you retain the customer, but you will be more likely to be recommended over your competitors.

Pricing: Take a second look at your pricing policies from time-to-time. How do you fare among your competitors? Has a customer ever complained about your pricing? If yes, reconsider what you are charging. There may be times when you cannot always compete on price—then play the quality card. Ensure what you are providing is worth every cent that the customer’s paying.

Feedback: Maintaining customer relationship demands that you listen to your customers. Send feedback forms to your customers. Have your salespersons call them up to check if they are experiencing any difficulty using your product or have a customer care executive place a call to check their satisfaction level with your service. Once you get the feedback, make sure you put it to use. Maintain transparency between your marketing, sales and customer service functions so that the gap between customer expectations and product/service delivery is tightly closed.

For more information visit www.newplans.com or e-mail at support@newplans.com

6 Tips for Better E-Mail Marketing

E-mail is a low-cost and fairly uncomplicated medium to connect with prospects. Here’s how to ensure you get maximum advantage from it.

Start on the right note: When a prospect signs up for your e-mails, send them an effective welcome message. This should be crisp, up-to-the point and convey clearly what the reader can expect in future, from your e-mails.

Go easy on images: Images do make e-mails look more interesting, however not all e-mail clients display images. Sometimes, e-mails with too many images are filtered as spam. Hence it’s advisable to have a good mix of rich content and some images to your e-mail.

Give valuable information: Prospects sign up for e-mails hoping to gain some value. If your e-mails are always about your business or products, the prospects eventually lose interest. Make sure that the e-mails are adding value to the readers by offering useful information. That way, if you occasionally send e-mails about a new product launch or upgrade, readers would be interested in knowing more.

Know when to send: One thing you need to make note of, as an e-mail marketer is that your recipients are not always into their inbox. Depending on who you are targeting, your prospects may be checking their e-mails twice a week. Tweak your e-mail marketing strategy to suit recipient behavior. An e-mail everyday can be frustrating if someone’s checking their mails on weekends.

Optimize for mobile devices: Android phones and tablets are changing e-mail marketing as well. With executives mostly checking their e-mails from their smart phones there’s a need for e-mail marketers to ensure that the e-mails are optimized for mobile devices as well.

Analysis: It is essential to know the results of your e-mail marketing efforts. Even if it is just a monthly newsletter, you should know exactly how many recipients were targeted, how many received the e-mail, what is the bounce, unsubscribe and click-thru rate and so on. Such details will help you understand how the recipients perceive your e-mails.

For more information visit www.newplans.com or e-mail us at support@newplans.com 

5 Tips for Effective Marketing Collateral Creation

Prospects draw up an image of the company based on its Marketing Hence it’s important that the company’s Marketing Collateral is created such that it sends the right message to the recipients. Here are 5 steps towards creating effective Marketing Collateral.

Know the target

Understand the audience well and then structure the marketing collateral to suit their taste. For example, the CFO of an organization is the chief target; it makes sense to include statistics and numbers as to how the product can help the company cut costs. On the other hand, if it is someone in the administrative department, then the collateral should emphasize on how it can help them save time.

Look from the target’s perspective

Many companies make the mistake of talking about themselves in their Marketing Collaterals. Marketing collaterals should contain information about the company’s offerings, but it should emphasize on how these offerings will be of use to the target.

Why you?

Marketing Collaterals should bring out the company’s unique selling points. Why should the targets choose your company over others? Give them a compelling reason to do so.

Personalize

Personalized communication always yields better response than mass communication. Customize your Marketing Collaterals to suit your target’s tastes and perspective.

Keep it Simple

Marketing Collaterals must be concise and clear. Cramping too much information into marketing collaterals only makes it tiring for the recipients. Keep the content lucid and easy to understand.

For more information visit www.newplans.com or e-mail us at support@newplans.com

Customer Care Through Social Media

Customer service through social media is becoming mandatory. Your customers will be talking about you--whether you are there or not. It serves their needs, and your reputation, if you are there for the conversation they have started. The best solution is to work actively in social media and use it to your advantage. Below are suggestions for entering the social media arena. 

LISTEN and LEARN: Browse around social media sites.  Learn the protocols and etiquette of  these sites if you are new to this world before you start talking. Before you jump in to support your brand, listen and understand what the customer is saying. 

LEARN MORE: Remember that this is free marketing research. Are there certain topics that dominate discussions of your industry? What is being written about your firm? While one remark may not be representative of the majority of your customer’s views, every comment out there may contain the hint of a way to make your product better, or perhaps identify some uses you never thought of. 

LISTEN. ASK. LISTEN: The best thing about social media is it puts you directly in touch with your customers. Use this powerful medium to listen to your customers. Ask them what you can do to make their lives simpler. That’s the easiest way to increasing customer satisfaction and retention…determine what they need! 

ACT: If there is a problem, or an unmet need, open a dialogue with the user. Ask questions to fully understand the issue, and propose a resolution. 

DON’T IGNORE: If you decide to place your brand out in social media-- be diligent. Never ignore customers. Concerns that seem simple, petty, or trivial: they are not. If it didn't matter to the customer, they wouldn't have logged-on to type. Remember, any failure to respond effectively will be broadcast widely. 

FOLLOW-UP: Immediately follow-up (and tell the customer that you will be doing so) so that they know you care about service.  Many people in business now prefer to be “followed-up” via e-mail, and not on the phone.  Always leave room at the end for any OTHER comments they may have.  “How would you improve the product?”  “Could we have found a better way to resolve your concerns?” 

NO SCRIPTING: Be you on your blog/Facebook/Twitter interactions. Do not use scripted answers. When someone reaches out to you on a social networking site, they are not looking for an automated response. Be the real person they want to talk to. Nothing annoys more than a canned sentence response--and yes, everyone knows if one is used.

DON’T BLUFF: This rule applies to customer service through any channel, not just to social media. But bluffing on social media can prove even more costly. Your inability to stand good on your promise will be broadcast to net surfers around the world. 

ENCOURAGE YOUR TEAM: While it’s great to have your top management blog and be in touch with customers, it’s even better to have your team interact with customers. Let’s face it—the front-line team is the one in contact with customers in the off-line world. So, let them play to their strengths online too.

Interacting with your clients on social media lends you a unique perspective. You gradually learn that your customers are not just your target audience, but real people with real needs. And this understanding automatically helps you serve your customers better.

For more information visit www.newplans.com or e-mail at support@newplans.com

Brand Management; New avenues for brand positioning

Branding was traditionally synonymous with logos and advertisements, mascots and bottle designs. The modern definition of “Branding” has abandoned this dated and non-customer-interactive notion. Brand management is the complex effort to ensure that once a product is positioned, every single interaction a customer has with the organization precisely reflects that positioning. In short, every touch-point should be in lockstep with the message. (Disney and McDonalds take this so seriously they created “colleges” for their employees) The challenge is managing and unifying the message as the number of meeting places with customers expands.

The challenge here is to project a consistent Brand image at all of these locations. From every contact, customers take away a perception of the company that builds –or distorts-its brand image. With the addition of each new channel for interaction comes the challenge to keep that channel in line with your internal brand positioning. On top of this, remember that social networking has created a very public space where the customer initiates a discussion of the brand, not the enterprise.

In summary, all of these new platforms offer great new opportunities to reach new markets, and new customers in old market. However, they add layers of complexity and risk to the task of ensuring each interaction is appropriate and reflective of your brand

With these challenges facing the Brand Management function, below are some of the solutions

Automation Can Help

Use of technology can simplify the complex process of brand management. A good branding or marketing automation software program can help in the following areas

CONSISTENCY - A marketing automation program can lend the all-important element of consistency to Branding. Whether the company logo is appearing on a flyer, print advertisement, sales presentation or on its social networking page, automation can help ensure that the logo and other corporate branding mechanisms are consistent with the company standards.

COST & TIME SAVINGS - By leveraging technology offered by marketing automation programs, the company can save on certain branding-related costs. For example, it would cost the company much more in terms of dollars and time if it had to individually brand every corporate communication. An advanced marketing automation program can replicate brand elements faster throughout the various communication channels, and at a lower cost than traditional methods. In short, it achieves greater accuracy, lower cost, and faster response times, all with a consistent message.

COORDINATION -   A good marketing automation software program would make sure that there’s conformity among all the marketing channels. The company’s message goes to the various avenues (including social media, e-mail marketing) in the same form and manner, assuring no dilution or distortion of the company message

By bringing the various elements of brand management onto a single platform, automation might just be the solution for the problems haunting brand management today.

To know more, visit www.newplans.com or e-mail at support@newplans.com

Plan of action to drive traffic to your website

Ever wondered what it takes to get frequent visitors on your website? Just launching a website is not sufficient to boost your website traffic and attract leads. Your efforts should go beyond adding tags and keywords.

Here are a few things to get you started -

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is important to a business as 90% of all online traffic is achieved through the various search engines. Therefore, the key to success is to know how well you can properly market your company through search engine optimization.

Submit articles and press releases

Write articles and press releases and submit to various sites online. Make sure to mention your company contact information at the end of each post.

Social media marketing

Develop online presence by actively participating on major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Keep people engaged with relevant materials and offers.

Blogging

Write and post blogs about your business on a regular basis. Frequency of the post can range from 3 to 5 times a week.

Marketing forum

Join your business related forum where you can converse with other people involved in the forum. Encourage people to post comments and participate.

For more infomration visit www.newplans.com or email to support@newplans.com

New improved Flash templates with music among latest enhancements

This month, Newplans successfully released several product enhancements including flash templates with music.

Additional enhancements include –

1.    Enhanced SEO features to boost web traffic and better search engine rankings.

2.    Auto e-mail sent to users with status report of project performance on a daily basis.  

3.    Multiple project e-mail blast capability to send all or selective listings in one email to recipients.

4.    Option to upload any external video to existing presentation.

5.    Data to be retained when shuffling between different templates to save time.

6.    Additional fields added to customize templates for specific users.

7.    Enhanced HTML editor for better text formatting.

8.    Easy drag and drop option to arrange images in image gallery.

9.    Projects to be auto saved to save projects instantly.

Visit http://www.newplans.com/ or email at support@newplans.com

Do you know why search engine optimization is important for your listing?

You know that your prospects are online looking for solutions that you have. But is your listing visible in the sea of competition? The more and more frequently your listing website appears in the search results, the more visitors will it receive.

Optimizing your listing to show up in search results may involve editing your listing content, adding keywords and codes. However, with Newplans, you simply don’t have to worry about grabbing the search engine spider’s attention.

All marketing collateral generated using Newplans.com is optimized for search engines by allowing you to add Meta Keywords and Meta Description tags that enable search engines to identify your marketing collateral on relevant web searches…and, you don’t even have to know HTML to be able to do this!

Read more / Visit http://www.newplans.com//

Five Steps to Smart Social Media Marketing

Everybody's on the Social Media trying to make their mark. Social Media experts are everywhere telling you what to do. Are you feeling a little lost among all this commotion? Then, this five step plan is just for you. It will help you indulge in Smart Social Media Marketing allowing you to utilize your time and Social Media Marketing efforts more effectively.

Don't spread yourself too thin: While it may be tempting sign up at every other social networking site, you should select two or three top Social Networking sites and focus on creating a strong network there.

Interact: Communicate with the members in your network. Answer questions; offer to help whenever you can and stay active in discussion threads and forums.

Be concise and clear: Social networking is not only about you. No one would be interested in your long status updates and posts. Instead, have short clear posts that tell your followers what you’re up to. A short link or an interesting video is fine, but long paragraphs are a 'No-no'.

Reuse content: Optimize your content utilization by posting the content you create across the various Social Media sites. For example, you can extract the key pieces of a blog and make a presentation to be put up on SlideShare.

Use technology: Smart use of technology will help you save time. Using technology allows you to focus on more important things like content creation, while the mundane tasks such as posting updates and tweets are taken care of by technology.

Personalization—an Overview

Marketing today has evolved into something much more than creating advertising collaterals and sending them to everyone in the company database. Marketers can no longer survive with a blindfolded approach to prospecting. In fact, leading companies are looking to create superior customer experience through personalization. In today’s internet age, prospects are more informed than ever before. They also have a lot of choice when it comes to selecting the right vendor. In order to strike a chord with the prospects in such environment, the marketing team has to focus on establishing a personal, one to one relationship with the prospect. Only building this relationship and cementing it over a period of time will enable the business to gain an edge over competition. In this scenario, Personalization becomes an indispensable tool as it helps you connect better with your audience. In this write-up, we provide you a few tips that you can put into action when looking to introduce personalization into your marketing strategy. This is because the prospect profiles have changed radically.

1. Get data—you cannot create a personalized experience for your prospects unless you understand them. And you can understand your prospects only when you have meaningful prospect data. So the first step towards personalization is to capture prospect data.

2. Rope in technology—Prospects today don’t have the time to answer too many questions. You should use technology to automatically capture prospect preferences and profile them, so that you don’t rely too much on the prospect to provide the information. There are various marketing automation platforms that track prospect behavior and provide you with detailed prospect information.

3. Be customer centric—adopt a customer-centric approach to business, which extends beyond marketing and sales. Think from the customer’s perspective as to how you can help them have a experience with your company that is truly unique and personalized.

4. Centralize data—bring all your functions on a common platform that facilitates easy data exchange. That means, sales team should know about every complaint or suggestion that the customer service team receives, and the marketing should know about every feedback the sales team gets. Easy information exchange will help you approach the customer with more relevant offerings.

5. Use next generation marketing tools—Earlier print advertising was probably the most common method to reach out to prospects. Today, a prospect is everywhere, thanks to Web 2.0. You need to be present at all these various avenues, and build a relationship with them. Be it Social Media Networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs or sites that promote data sharing like YouTube, SlideShare—you need to follow the prospect in a bid to understand their needs.

Personalization can help connect better with your prospects by creating a one-on-one relationship between you and the prospects. Individualizing prospect experience helps you build a more transparent, direct and value adding relationship with your prospects and can help drive sales and generate revenue.

Tracking your Leads

Identifying your leads and capturing information about them that will help you to qualify your leads and close sales is very important for any business. Tracking the leads that come in is as important as lead generation. But do you know nearly 80% of leads are never followed up?

Newplans.com's built in IP Tracking functionality is way beyond other analytical tools. While other systems only tell you where the lead came from, Newplans.com goes a step beyond the standard webmaster tools and provide a detailed analysis of your web traffic--including tracking the name of the company that accessed your marketing material or your personal/company website---using the advanced IP tracking system.

By providing you detailed information about the lead such as company name, exact location, and their online activity, Newplans.com helps you engage in well targeted marketing that helps you reach out to your ideal audience and market your listings better.

Read more / Visit http://www.newplans.com/

Give your prospects an interactive experience

Flyers, brochures, postcards, though tried and tested successful marketing tools, are not enough to have everlasting impact on your prospects. Time constraint along with the availability of multiple choices makes it difficult for buyers to make a buying decision. Effective marketing collateral are great at helping people understand and remember what you’re trying to sell them.

Newplans has integrated various interactive technologies to help you focus on the key selling points of your listing by making them more interesting to your prospects. Using Newplans.com, you can offer an interactive experience for your prospects by creating hotspots on floor plans, pictures, site plans, or stacking plans.

Using Newplans you can also link a hotspot to an image, add a note, attach a document, video or any web-link. Newplans comes with a library of icons to accurately represent content behind each hotspot. Hotspots can be created freehand or using icons.

Read more / Visit http://www.newplans.com/

Crack the Social Media Code

Buyers today are web smart. Their buying decision is hugely depended on the kind of research they undertake on the net. Hence, it is vital that your listings should be on the web where your prospects can find you easily.

Newplans.com offers Social Media Content Syndication at the click of a button! That means you can publish your presentations, videos, brochures, flyers, e-mail templates and other high-impact marketing materials, or their links, on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Slide Share. By publishing your marketing collateral on social media and other classified sites, you are making it available to millions of prospects on the web.

Read more / Visit http://www.newplans.com/

5 Ways to Strengthen Your Brand

Five easy steps are all it takes to create a stronger, positive brand image

Brand image is largely based on how customers and prospects associate with the business. Customers and prospects form a certain perception of the business based on their interaction with it. That becomes the brand image of the business. The brand image is one of the most important assets a business has. A business’s success is largely dependent on how its prospects and customers perceive it as a brand. Here are 5 steps that will propel your brand towards creating a positive image.

Know Your Customers: Understand your customers. Knowing the target audience well enables a business to have well-directed, relevant communication with them.

Consistency: Be consistent in your approach to customers. Consistency has to be on two accounts—frequency of communication and the content. This influences the customers, to associate certain words and images used consistently in company communication, with the brand.

Build Brand Presence: Today there are various tools available for customer interaction. These include e-mails, live chats, webinars, blogs, Videologs, Social media and so on. Be available to your customers across these various touch-points.

Add Value: Provide your customers with something they perceive to be of value. Some examples are free tips in your domain of expertise that would be of use to your customers, going that extra mile to simplify the buying process for the customers etc.

Innovate: Be unique in your product/service offering. Constantly innovate so that your brand is a class apart from your competitors. If you are dealing in a product that has way too much competition, innovate on other fronts. An example would be offering customer service on social media or at home customer service, that would set differentiate you from your competitors, lending a unique feel to your brand.

By following these simple steps, a business can significantly influence its customers and prospects to associate positively with its brand.

Content Syndication

Content syndication is a way of getting web contents around the internet. In simple terms, content syndication refers to distributing your content on various websites. Making content syndication a part of online marketing strategy helps in generating high traffic, brand awareness and improved SEO rankings. Content syndication helps in getting qualified traffic which in turn results in high in-bound links to other contents on your website or blogs. 

     

Successful content syndication process includes several steps like:

Content - People surfing the net are usually looking for information pertaining to their search. Hence it is vital that the content published is relevant and meaningful and non-sales like. The information reaching your audience should be educative and should help in converting prospects into loyal customers.

Networking – Reach out to your targeted audience and make it easy for them to subscribe to or share your content. Keeping them updated on new content published is also important. Join various social networking sites to reach out to a varied range of audience.

Web feed – Web feed refers to making the content available from a site to provide others with the summary of the website’s newly added content. With RSS feed there is a steady flow of syndicated content to your readers. Web feeds allow your website visitors to subscribe to and receive frequent updates on the content added by you recently.

Publish – Publish fresh content to all major article, newsletter, and social media sites. Make sure that you refrain from publishing duplicate content. Also, encourage readers to post comments on the content you publish.

With content syndication it is easier to spread word about your business and brand to many people at once. More content you generate, more the visibility enjoyed by your business which, in turn, will generate more customers

 .

E-mail Deliverability

Every marketer understands the importance of creating and maintaining e-mail lists to send out e-mail campaigns regularly to their prospects. However, the success of every e-mail campaign is governed by the senders’ reputation and e-mail deliverability rate. To ensure that your e-mails are successful in establishing your relationship with your recipients, you have to first make sure that your e-mail reaches its destination i.e. the recipients’ inbox.

Of the thousands or millions of e-mails sent out, it is not unusual that around 10% of the recipients don’t get your e-mail. This is where e-mail deliverability plays an important role. Though the concept of e-mail deliverability may sound simple, the process can be complex.

To ensure optimal e-mail deliverability here are some best practices that every marketer should be well aware of.

Permission – It is a good practice to get confirmation from your e-mail recipients to be included in your e-mail list. This will ensure that your e-mails are not blocked or unsubscribed by uninterested recipients.

E-mail content – Recipients look forward to significant and relevant content. The more relevant and meaningful your e-mail is, better it is received by the recipient.  Avoid using typical spam phrases and too many images to evade your e-mail from being flagged as spam.

One to one marketing – It takes more than to simply insert the recipient’s name in an e-mail body or the subject line to personalize it.  An advanced marketing automation system like MindMatrix’s AMP will enable you to personalize every graphic and text in the e-mail going out of the system. Moreover, it will also allow you to customize e-mails based on the contact’s past behavior.

Plan your campaigns – Sending too many e-mails in close intervals will result in more bounces or unsubscribed rates. But too little can also lead to no results. Hence it is important to make sure that you send out e-mails at least once every 90 days.

Option to unsubscribe – Make it easy for the recipients to opt out of the e-mail list and all future e-mails by providing an unsubscribe button in the e-mail body.

Request to white list – You can request the recipient in your e-mail to add your e-mail address to their ‘Safe Senders’ list. It is advisable to use only one e-mail address to send out the e-mails every time.

Testing – Many recipients may block images in the e-mails they receive. Hence, it is always better to test your e-mail before mass sending them to check whether your e-mail communicates the message without displaying the images.

Bounce management – Handling bounces is very vital for better e-mail deliverability.

E-mails sent to recipients may bounce back for many reasons. It could be because of wrong e-mail address or it could be due to technical glitch.

Monitoring e-mail campaigns – Every e-mail sent out needs monitoring to ensure maximum deliverability. Reports on open rates, click thru rates, bounce rates, unopened rates will help you to know how well your e-mail has performed and also help you to device a better e-mail campaign to be sent out next.

Virtual Tours—A must-have marketing tool

Virtual Tours are becoming a favorite among marketers today

Many marketers, agents and brokers are resorting to Virtual Tours to showcase their listings. We now tell you why Virtual Tours are fast becoming a part of the marketing strategy of real estate brokers.

Increasing number of internet users: Research states that about 90% of buyers use the web extensively when looking to make a purchase. By creating Virtual Tours of your listing and making them available online, you will be able to reach out to that 90% of the target market.

Exposure:  Virtual Tour can provide your listing the kind of exposure that cannot be compared to any other medium. You can publish your listing’s virtual tour on the social media and thus share it will millions of people on the web.

Better Response: A Virtual Tour is a refreshing change from the mundane form of marketing materials such as brochures and flyers. A virtual tour is more likely to capture prospect attention than regular 2 dimensional images as it is interactive and gives them a ‘real feel’ of what the listing is like.

Flexibility: A Virtual Tour offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to showcasing the listing. You can focus on the areas of the listing that you wish to highlight. You can even attach documents, links and images to a virtual tour using hot-spotting tools.

Available 24X7: Virtual Tours provide the prospects with the convenience of being able to look at the listing at anytime. By making the listing available to the prospects for viewing 24X7 increases the chances of it being sold.

Saves Time: A Virtual Tour saves time for both—buyer and the seller. It allows the buyers to get a good view of the listing without exposing them to the pressures of an on-site or physical listing inspection. Based on the virtual tour the buyer can decide which listings are worth a deeper look and which are not. It is also beneficial for the listing owner and broker as it filters out a lot of prospects and only those who are genuinely interested in the listing are likely to pursue it further.

Virtual Tours can be a great addition to your marketing strategy in today’s highly competitive marketing environment. A well-crafted virtual tour can convince buyers to take the next step.

You can make your virtual tour stand out by making them interactive. If you are using images make sure they are of good quality and high-definition, and if you are relying on a video, make sure it is tastefully shot so as to reflect the pizzazz of the listing. You can make it more interesting by adding music or make it more informative by adding commentary or documents or links using hot-spotting tools. The ultimate aim of a virtual tour is same as that of any other marketing material—to close a deal and a well-designed virtual tour will be able to do just that.