How AI and video marketing can work together in the time of COVID
Selling luxury real estate remotely using AI and video.
“While early adopters of AI are still bullish, their competitive advantage may be waning as barriers to adoption continue to fall and more creative use of the technology grows.” Those are the words of Deloitte AI Institute Principal Nitin Mittal in the “State of AI in the Enterprise” survey released yesterday.
AI + video marketing = revenue
One creative use of AI is its application to video marketing. That use has delivered revenue gains for Duvora, a technology provider that specializes in digital marketing for luxury real estate—worth between $5 million and $30 million. This month Duvora introduced a new AI-driven video platform dedicated to virtual luxury home tours as a way to meet the needs of affluent home buyers in the COVID environment.
The platform ingests videos from luxury real estate properties in international markets like Spain and three main domestic markets—California, Florida and New York. AI processes information about the scenes which appear in the video, and creates a timeline of when and where they appear. AI identifies each room at the property and its amenities, layouts of the bedrooms, the space and design of the kitchen, aerial views of the property, and other property characteristics.
The AI then tracks the exact user experience of reviewing the luxury real estate property, which rooms people visited, where they lingered the longest, which amenities and objects were viewed repeatedly, and how many times video segments were viewed, generating a profile of the visitor’s behavior for the real estate agent.
In the luxury real estate market, the investment in AI video marketing is seeing a higher ROI than investing in traditional photography.
“AI gives the agent immediate insight of what buyers are looking for, and dramatically shortens the sales cycle,” said Duvora founder and technology consultant Derek Devore. “With the explosion of COVID, videos have to be done well with high-quality cinematography, but using AI in the right way can lead to instant revenue, no matter what the industry.”
The value of video
In the luxury real estate sector, video viewers who spend more time on aerial shots of the property are more concerned with property shape and size, proximity to neighbors and any nearby commercial developments. Because COVID has increased buyers’ desire for space, Duvora put maximum effort and resources within their platform for AI tracking in aerial video segments.
“We started the video platform with AI in 2016 and it allowed us to expand our reach to our high-net worth audience,” said Devore. “Our new AI capabilities allows for us to provide a hyper-personalized experience that can monetize traffic and move past just the number of times a video or video segment has been viewed.”
The AI tracking not only gives information on the property they viewed, but combined with Multiple Listing Service data, identifies future properties to show.
“[MLS] information is not always in-depth, so the video backed with AI fills many voids,” said Devore. “We have hundreds of metadata tags on each property video and they allow for further insight on consumer preferences. Any company investing in video marketing with AI pushes them light years ahead of most competition.”
Some best practices
Whatever you are marketing, here are some best practices when using AI to power your video marketing:
- Vary the videos. Whether you are showcasing a beach house in Boynton Beach, a penthouse on Park Avenue, create distinct options in your video content to help AI learn through contrasting outcomes.
- Review the repeat visitor. Repeat visitors often behave differently the second time around. Use AI to study the differences and generate revenue by personalized follow-up and outreach.
- Forget the photos. Want to make the transition to AI-backed video marketing? Then do so. 100 percent. Eliminate all marketing photos as they can give a 20th century feel to a 21st century marketing experience.
AI is becoming a necessity
According to Deloitte’s survey of 2,737 information technology and line-of-business executives taken in late 2019, 61% of respondents said they expect AI to substantially transform their industry in the next three years. Adopters are making significant investments with 53% spending more than $20 million in the past year on AI and talent. The category of adopters has increased from 21 percent to 26 percent since the 2018 survey.
“AI will be viewed as a necessity by more and more organizations in a post COVID world,” said Deloitte Vice Chairman and U.S. Technology Sector Leader Paul Silvergate.
“It has been so much easier to reach customers at scale with AI because it is such a faster marketing process and the more they search the more we can provide instant feedback,” said Devore. “Personalization of any consumer experience equals revenue, and AI has proven that in our luxury real estate space. If we can do it here, it can be done anywhere.”
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.
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