How to be a virtual tour guide to attract customers
You see them every time you go to an attraction or city.
Notices and ads urging visitors to view the town with an experienced tour guide. Ride on a double-decker bus/duck boat/horse-drawn carriage/whatever.
Those guides will show you everything from where the stars live/to where the disasters happened/to where ghosts hang out.
Doesn’t matter. Basically their business model is that they know pieces of local information people don’t know and are willing to pay to learn.
Essentially, isn’t a professional real estate agent or broker a neighborhood tour guide?
With the right tools, such as the real estate search tool SpatialMatch which is presented on a geo-spatial map-based platform, agents can easily position themselves as local tour guides.
In fact, they can have some fun with the process that will grab the attention of Facebook fans and Twitter followers.
SpatialMatch is basically a data widget – a hyper-local gateway to more than one hundred layers of data from schools to businesses to highways to parks to golf courses, etc. Everything that makes up a community.
All this information is integrated into a map, which is integrated with an IDX to pull in local MLS listings.
Are you starting to see the bigger picture now? Access to tons of local data immediately makes an agent or broker an expert in their area.
A tour guide so to speak.
Therefore, an agent can create a page, titled “Top Five Places to Take Your Kids on a Rainy Afternoon” and point out all those places on SpatialMatch. Post a link on Facebook, Twitter, a local news site, wherever.
(By the way, if you happen to look at the cover of magazines, you will see people love lists).
How about: “Seven Historical Sites Within 10 Miles of Downtown.”
Or, “Three Best Places to Walk Your Dog.”
Maybe, get really offbeat – “Businesses With the Coolest Art on their Walls.”
Or be trendy, “Five Best Places to get a Gourmet Hamburger.”
SpatialMatch comes with handy drawing tools. So you can map out routes just as easily as any boat navigator.
“Virtual Tour of Five Homes with Awesome Christmas Light Displays”
Or, follow this route to find “Largest Trees in (Your Hometown).”
People love this stuff. They will read it. Forward it to their friends.
And they love that an agent or broker is providing it for free.
It’s going to get their attention. And if you continue to get their attention, chances are you are going to get their attention when they decide to list their home and upgrade to another home.
After all, they’ve been following your “tours.” You have created top-of-mind-awareness as the hyper-local expert.
And surveys show, that’s what real estate customers want.
