How a Real Estate Marketing Company Is Using Visme to Create Interactive Content
The future of visual marketing has officially arrived.
Virtual reality and immersive, 3D media — once heralded as the next frontiers in communication technology — are already revolutionizing the way we market and sell products. And it’s not just corporate giants who are using it — small businesses are too.
Take, for example, ShowcasePros: a small agency based in Birmingham, Alabama that creates interactive, 3D virtual tours of real estate properties. Founded by Barry Bates and Julie Butler almost a year ago, the company uses cloud-based 3D imaging and aerial site photography to make real estate listings more interactive and engaging.
When he started his business, Barry was in need of a tool that would allow him to compile several of these virtual tours, links and descriptions into one page, without having to create an entire web page from scratch. He did some research online and found that Visme allowed him to easily create online interactive brochures in minutes.
We had a chance to speak with Barry and find out more about his experience with Visme. Here is what he had to say in his own words:
For those who are unfamiliar with the use of VR for visual marketing solutions, tell us a little bit about your work.
We have a small agency called ShowcasePros, and we do immersive, 3D photography for real estate and businesses that want to show off their properties. So, we always have the need to create visual marketing material on the fly that our clients can easily access.
When we do a home or a business, we have a standard procedure that we follow: We go out and literally scan the building. Some people think that we’re videographers, but what we really do is virtually scan properties and those examples live in the cloud.
How did you first find Visme?
The reason I needed Visme was that I couldn’t send a client a lengthy URL. I was worried about them being able to open it, so I used Visme to put the final product onto a page and also add directions and text around the actual deliverable.
We have a standard brochure that we create in Visme. It’s really like a web page, and we’re able to put examples from our gallery, add documents that clients can open and insert virtual tours that they can navigate from one place.
We’ve been able to do anything we can think of. For example, we used it to pitch to clients. We just lay it all out on Visme, like a website. I can just send someone a link with everything that they might want to see, be it a video or a deliverable that we have.
Can you give us a few examples of how Visme is helping you create visual marketing content?
It’s worked incredibly well for us. It allows us to create layouts quickly. A lot of times making the layout in WordPress or any website builder is kind of complex, but with Visme, it’s really easy. We just create the content and then embed it onto our site.
For example, I create all my pricing tables in Visme and then just embed that onto a page on my website. This way, I can free form anything — it’s fast, easy, printable. I can update it in a minute and it gives me a ton of flexibility that I don’t have with a website builder.
How did you hear about Visme and why did you choose it over other tools?
I actually signed up for a free trial of Canva and played with it a little bit. Through online searches, your tool came up and I did a comparison at the time. I was like, “this is a no-brainer.” It was so easy to embed content and create a live brochure with videos and links in Visme. Yours worked really well for me.
For example, I spoke with someone the other day and got his hot points. I went to a project in Visme, put a couple of things in and “poof,” here we had a live brochure he could open up and look at different things. It’s fluid, not linear like a PowerPoint presentation, so I can put them on one page to allow clients to move around and take advantage of links, descriptions and call outs.
What other positive business results have you seen from using the tool?
This tool has given me some really outstanding ways to put stuff in front of people that they can get their arms around. In just an hour, I get can get a lot done.
Although my material isn’t fluffy, beautiful design, it gets the job done and looks pro. Sometimes you dread using a tool because you know you’re going to fight it, but with this, it’s like, “oh, I need to do this, no problem.”
It’s also really convenient: I can meet with clients, open Visme on their computer and create and forward a link right in front of them. Most importantly, you can duplicate something you’ve done and use it as a foundation and build it specifically to a client quickly. I have practically zero use for PowerPoint now.
If we hired a designer, we’d probably be back on pace with everyone else. But with this tool, I have everything I need to get stuff done quickly.
Would you recommend Visme to others?
I have a friend who also started his business nine months ago. He asked me, “how do you do all this so fast? We don’t have a webpage or anything.” So I told him to check out Visme.
Your tool is one of the monthly payouts I don’t have to think twice about. Your pricing is incredibly fair and if I find something this useful, then there’s no problem paying for it.
The free trial gave me a complete look before I purchased, while others make the free version so stupid that you don’t realize the power of the good one.
Lastly, what new features, if any, would you like to see in Visme?
I give you 99 stars out of a 100, and I can’t even tell you why I can’t give you 100.
But there’s one small thing I’d like to see: You have pre-made shapes and most of these are rounded. Since I like everything to be sharp, I would like more shapes like boxes and rectangles with sharp corners.
Your Turn
Looking for a cost-effective way to quickly and easily create visual marketing content for your startup or business? Take Visme for a test drive here and let us know what you think below.
The original version of this post first appeared on Visme’s Visual Learning Center.
