3D Virtual Tours have now become a great tool for businesses and organizations to easily showcase their space to clients anywhere. But simply doing a 3D virtual tour of one’s space is not enough to maximize the visibility of the space. There are many effective ways to increase exposure. Here are 6 ways to get the best out of your 3D virtual tours-
1. Embedding the virtual tour into your own website
You have just finished creating your 3D virtual tour. What’s the next step? How do you share it with your existing and potential clients? Do you just email your virtual tour’s link to them? Or, just make a post on your social media page(s) about it and expect everyone to click on the link? These are all good ways of promoting your virtual tour to your audience. But to get the best out of your virtual tours, you must embed it into your website. A website is considered to be the backbone of a business and it extends to every aspect of your digital marketing strategy.
Having your virtual tour embedded into your website will definitely increase your website traffic, keep the visitors engaged and even increase the opportunities for sales.
You are probably thinking, ‘What about the bounce rates? How do I control that?’. Well, we have some suggestions that will help you reduce the bounce rates as well. Users when shown content, are more prone to interact with it if they know exactly what is being shown. Otherwise, if you are showing your post about your virtual tour to an audience that isn’t very clear about the concept, it will make them confused. Some users might enter the link but leave immediately – this is called a bounce. In order to keep the bounce rate to a minimum, try the following tips:
• Make sure the way your audience chooses to enter the virtual tour is distinctively different from the rest of your space
• The copy or caption must be short and concise which will instruct the user to enter your virtual tour
2. Promote the link on social media platforms
Sharing your virtual tour’s link on social media will also give you great exposure. You can create a post using the direct link or, you can up your digital marketing game and use the link of the landing page of your website where you have embedded your virtual tour and create an ad out of it – this will definitely maximize the exposure. This way you will be increasing engagement and visits on both your website as well as your virtual tour.
Promoting your virtual tour on social media platforms such as – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. will allow you to get insights on the traction of your ads. These insights will allow you to understand your audience better and also help you come up with better strategies for your marketing activities.
Honda Bangladesh (DHS Motors) promoting their virtual tour’s link on their Facebook page.
One of our clients, Honda Bangladesh (DHS Motors) have confirmed getting a positive response from its customers and that promoting the virtual tour of their Honda Flagship Showroom has definitely contributed to their sales.
Always make sure to use keywords that describe your post’s theme and turning them into hashtags will increase your chances of being discovered by different users. This will increase the reach of your virtual tour’s post immensely.
3. Share it in the newsletter with your Stakeholders/Email campaign
Including your virtual tour in newsletters and email campaigns will surely make both your current and prospective clients and stakeholders aware of what your organization has to offer. This is another effective way of keeping your clients and prospects informed and interested in your business and may also lead to getting new customers for your business.
4. Embed the link in your email signature
How many emails do we send out every day? A really great way of promoting your virtual tour is by embedding the link in your email signature – this is another way of doing free advertising. What better way is there of letting people know about your digital space every time you send an email?
There are many ways you can embed your virtual tour’s link in an email signature. You can take a nice screenshot or an image of the tour, that will grab the user’s attention, sizing it down to a thumbnail to be included in your email signature, and then just simply hyperlink it to your virtual tour. When someone clicks on the thumbnail, they will be directed to your virtual tour.
If you want to make it a little more interesting, you can generate GIFs from your virtual tours that can be used as a thumbnail in your email signature and follow the same process of hyperlinking it to your virtual tour. It can also work as a small preview of the actual tour, that is sure to grab the user’s attention.
There are many tools available that allow you to track link clicks in your emails, but you have to be careful about not causing spam alerts for your consumers. There are many short-link generating sites that also provide a dashboard for the users to view and analyze data for free. You can use them to create short links for your virtual tours and use them in your email signature.
5. Integrate it with Google Street View
We all go to Google Maps for directions or to quickly access contact and location details of a place. Users are known to browse through business and organizational information and end up exploring the content that is published alongside your listing.
Warronji, Kitchen, Bathroom & Tile, in Waardenburg, Netherlands
This is where you can integrate your virtual tour. Google Maps is a unique platform because it can serve traditional media like photos and videos and also act as a medium for 360° content. With this feature, you can publish your virtual tour or the panoramas you’ve created into Google Maps to increase viewership and to drive footfall to your space, be it a retail showroom, facility or a business space.
6. SMS Marketing
Just because other ways to reach out to your customers have been introduced, does not mean SMS marketing cannot be used anymore – it is still a great tool that allows you to directly connect with your customers. You can include this in your integrated marketing communications and plan promotional campaigns accordingly.
A great way to utilize SMS marketing is to use it as a reminder for your customers and stakeholders to check out your new virtual tour. SMS marketing campaigns are known to generate results with high ROI when combined with other mediums, such as- email marketing, social media marketing etc.
Keeping Track of your Metrics
Once you have published your virtual tour on media – your website, social media channels, email signatures, etc., you would definitely require a system in place for you to analyze the data and gauge the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Some key metrics to keep in check are:
• Number of visitors and their location
• Source of their visits – what channels the users are accessing to view your virtual tour
• Conversion rates
• Percentage of users viewing the tour from their desktops and mobile devices
Keeping these metrics in regular check will definitely help you get the best out of your virtual tour. If you feel that we might have missed out on mentioning more ways of promoting a virtual tour, please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us in the comments section. We always love hearing from our audience, so any sort of suggestion will be appreciated.
If you wish to showcase your space in fully interactive 3D or, you want to learn more about Auleek 3D Virtual Tour solutions, get in touch with us here: rudaba@auleekl6.sg-host.com