Virtual tours made it possible to explore a physical space without physically being in the location or environment. With 3D virtual tours, businesses were able to continue to reach out to their customers and audiences with their new products and services despite the travel restriction protocols being imposed globally. As a powerful storytelling tool, it creates a highly personalized experience for your viewers that is fully immersive and interactive. This helps pique their interest in your brand and services which can also motivate them further to visit your location, purchase your product and avail your company’s services, meanwhile, virtual tours could provide the information they may have missed during an in-person visit. By having virtual tours available to your customer and audiences, you create a bond and build their trust with your brand knowing that their needs are met whenever and wherever.
To make the most out of your Matterport virtual tour, you should be knowledgeable about where your customers or audiences are most active. Make use of the available tools and analytics within your site or on social media–know where, when, and what time they are most active and schedule your content accordingly. With quality content in mind and an understanding of analytics, your virtual tours will perform well. Here’s a list of platforms you should consider publishing your virtual tours:
The most important place to post and promote your virtual tours is within your website. Your homepage is the best place to start since it is typically the most visited page within your website and is the initial access for first time users or visitors of your site. In a commissioned study by Google in 2015, business listings that included photos and virtual tours were twice as likely to generate interest online leading to a 41% increase in booked reservations. Plus, having a 3D virtual tour on your homepage will immensely help boost your branding. Strategically place your virtual tours throughout your website to increase the tour viewership and drive more traffic to your website. The majority of those brands that were listed in Forbes World’s Most Valuable Brands are utilizing some forms of virtual reality or augmented reality and it is important to note that those companies even reported a 34% increase in productivity among their employees while their profits continue to increase.
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On your Social Media Accounts
If your business is not yet on any social media, you are doing a big mistake. Through social media, we are more connected than ever, and in 2020, there were reportedly over 3.6 billion people who were using social media worldwide. The forecast predicts that in 2025, it will balloon to 4.41 billion users. Hence, it is imperative that you publish your virtual tour on social media sites to increase your tour’s viewership.
Stay up to date on the current social media trends and find more ways to improve your social media presence. In essence, there are some general elements you can do to create an effective and captivating post on social media:
Visuals – Make sure to use images or thumbnails to your videos that are interesting and will surely grab the viewer’s attention. In short, ask yourself “What would make them stop scrolling and pay attention?”
Caption – Your captions should be compelling and should be relevant to your visual content–it should leave your viewers wanting more.
Call To Action – Want to achieve your marketing goals? Include a killer call to action in your post. A good call to action promotes interaction and enhance conversion rate. It motivates your audiences to interact with your content, whether to click a button, comment, share, sign up, click a button, or shop.
Hashtag – Use keywords that appropriately describe your post and turn them into hashtags which will increase your chances of being discovered by users throughout any social media platform. Consider tagging influencers or big brands related to your post, as well.
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On Google Maps
To date, there are about a billion monthly active users of Google Maps and it is still the leading app used to quickly gain information like contact and location details of any business. Having your virtual tour available on Google Maps makes you stand out and gain a lot of visitors to your site. 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 the panoramas you’ve created into Google Maps to increase viewership and to drive more in-person visits.
After publishing your virtual tour on these platforms, take some time to analyze your analytics and see how well your tour is performing to gain insights on how to further improve in marketing your content. Check for the number of visitors, where they are from, the average time they spent on the tour, the device used to view the tour, and how they discovered your virtual tour.
