By Ty Downing, SkyNav™ 360
Your master-planned community is truly exceptional. Now you need to capture potential homebuyers’ attention and stir their emotions—but this can be a challenge. The static images you show them are beautiful, but they don’t give a real sense of depth, space and proximity. You may have truly remarkable features in your community, like sunset parks, dog parks or hiking and biking trails, but these amenities need to be experienced to be truly appreciated. Moreover, you’re struggling to stand out in an ever-growing market—and are having trouble attracting prospects from a distance because they aren’t making the commitment to plan a visit in person.
These problems can be a thing of the past if you leverage immersive technology to introduce your planned community online. Immersive technology captures potential buyers’ attention, places them into the landscape, and allows them to interact with features in the surrounding landscape. You’ll generate high-caliber leads, attract out-of-town buyers (even before construction and development are complete)—all while saving your sales team time and money. There are emerging technology companies that provide immersive products such as 3D ground tours of homes using Matterport, or other similar services, however these are only fixed on showing the actual home, not the community. What if there were services out there that did both? An all-in-one immersive experience?
There are. These new services allow seamless experiences from the sky, to the ground, right into the home, an exciting new concept that brings mixed reality into the buying mix by using VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), 3D objects and a host of digital assets into the experience. Here is the power of using sky to ground immersive technology.
Sky-To-Ground 360° 3D Tours Are More Than Immersive, They’re VR Ready
- Immerse your visitors completely with high-quality 3D, 360 imagery within an interactive map.
- Allow visitors to watch your entire video collection within the tour, giving them spatial perspective.
- Visitors can switch back and forth between aerial and ground views.
- Visitors can view your models, model rows and fly right into the home from the sky, or the ground.
- Visitors can view your amenities and fly right into them from the sky, or the ground.
- Viewers can experience tours on any desktop, mobile device and in virtual reality (requires no downloadable app).
Do These 360° Tours Motivate Viewers to Purchase?
An important question remains: Immersive tours and other WebVR technology may be interesting and fun, but does this type of marketing successfully motivate viewers to become homeowners? The statistics are truly encouraging.
- 58% of home buyers found their next home on a mobile device.
- 360° photos perform 45% better than conventional pictures.
- 29% more people viewed a 360° video than the same video in a traditional format.
- Users spent an average of 25 minutes longer on immersive tour platforms, like SkyNav, than on any other page on the website.
Proof is in the Pudding
Upscale North Carolina coastal community, St. James Plantation, used SkyNav technology to introduce online visitors to its amenities and experiences. Dan Kingsbury, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for St.James Plantation confirms that SkyNav has been a smashing success for his team.
“We have more showings booked as a result of SkyNav, and it’s only been live for 4 weeks,” said Kingsbury.
Implement Immersive Technology to Increase Bookings
With immersive 360° technology, you can use many different tactics to promote, incentivize, and intrigue prospective homebuyers…all with increased bookings and sales as the result. Here are just a few ways this can be done.
- Take a step inside: One of the most captivating features of this type of technology is the integration of 360° views: not just aerial, but exterior ground and indoor tours. You can even add audio to make the experience multi-sensory. The home buyer will not have to imagine—they will be immersed in the experience.
- Remarketing: Once your viewer has become captivated, it’s time to throw out a little incentive to motivate them. “Like what you see? Book an in-person tour now and dinner’s on us!”
- Direct sales: During the tour, invite the viewer to make a reservation to take a tour in-person.
- Content marketing: The imagery from these tours can be used on every medium you can imagine. Use 360° images on Facebook and other photo assets on Instagram and Twitter. Use images on websites, emails and other digital marketing. That’s just the beginning of what you can do.
Is it Time For Your Community Marketing to Take to the Sky?
There is no doubt about it…this technology is the ultimate shift in the immersive marketing experience for homebuyers contemplating life in a master-planned community. Your community can benefit from this one-of-a-kind user experience that’s guaranteed to convert viewers into customers.
About SkyNav™360
With our own proprietary service SkyNav™, we’re taking virtual reality travel tours, and experience marketing to the next level for destination marketing with sky to ground 360° 3D tours that are incredibly immersive and VR ready for your potential travelers. For added immersive marketing, we are now offering AR (Augmented Reality) to truly offer a mixed reality experience for your visitors, leading them to convert. Learn more at SkyNav360.com.