With the post-Christmas tidy up complete, your premises are no doubt looking shinier than ever, which is why January is always a very popular time to capture a virtual tour. From newly spruced showrooms, to renovated factories, or maybe you’ve moved to a bigger, more modern facility?
Its the perfect time to “show off” your business and so a virtual tour may be something you are considering. BUT – how do you actually level up your virtual tour from a (admittedly great-looking!) 360° wander around your premises to a genuinely powerful sales tool that can showcase your products, processes and facilities. Used correctly, your virtual tour will drive traffic to your website or even through the front door.
With many years experience in creating virtual tours for a wide range of business sectors, here’s our Top Five guide to the best ways to utilise virtual tours as a robust sales driver and key part of your strategic digital marketing.
1. Create Interactive Product Catalogues
Strategy: Integrate clickable product hotspots throughout your virtual tour.
Interactive hotspots are a crucial component of all our virtual tours. With the option to add text, images, video, PDF downloads or HTML app features, hotspots turn your virtual tour into a powerfully visual bolt-on to your website, allowing the connection of your existing marketing materials with strong calls to action.
Example:
If you are a direct-to-consumer business then it is possible to embed an “Add to Cart” button on each product in your showroom.
Benefit:
Increases customer engagement and simplifies the purchasing process.
2. Offer Exclusive Tour-Based Promotions
Strategy: Create a ‘treasure hunt’ with a special offers for products or services featured in your tour.
Virtual tours allow the embedding of any 3D object into a tour. This isn’t just limited to treasure hunt items but also includes other options such as video playing on TV screens, green screen videos that place your staff within the tour, adding a human face to their visit. Every virtual tour effectively becomes a playground for your ideas, with a huge range of possibilities to drive engagement.
Example:
Embed a digital item (easter egg at Easter or Santa at Christmas) within your tour that when clicked on offers a product voucher (+ T’s & C’s), or you can run a competition with a data capture form triggered upon clicking the hidden object.
Benefit:
Encourages immediate action, data capture opportunities and boosts sales conversions.
3. Leverage Social Media Snippets
Strategy: Create short, engaging clips from your virtual tour for social platforms.
Your virtual tours will contain views of facilities that even site visitors may not usually be able to see, or you may capture areas that would not be in the public view but showcase your facilities for staff or investments in technology. These are all important elements in building brand trust and your story.
Matterport virtual tours allow the exporting of short video content that loop and are therefore perfect for social media. Such videos can be automatically generated from your virtual tour and enhanced with branding audio or on screen titles. This is a simple way to generate a library of moving images showcasing your property should the budget for high-quality video not be available.
Example:
Share a 15-second Instagram Reel showcasing your automation process – a video per machine that could be released over a series of days to flag each stage of your production process.
Benefit:
Increases awareness of your premises and allows access to areas clients and customers might never see, which builds brand trust and and drives traffic to your full tour and product pages.
4. Automated tours
Strategy: Allow users to sit back and be guided around your premises, highlighting key products or services without them having to explore manually.
Utilising tour highlight functionality, automated tours that can be triggered at the click of a button on launching the tour. Utilising this functionality in conjunction with email campaigns or social media, you are able to highlight key points within the virtual tour (for example key departments), and even add audio voiceover that will trigger at each point giving some information or background into the area, This guided approach is especially helpful for any clients or customers, who may not be tech-confident and gives them the key points without having to manually guide their way through the tour.
Example:
Manufacturers could guide users around their factory facility with audio triggered at each key machine on the tour, with the audio outlining processes and output with encouragements to engage with additional media or contact for more details.
Benefit:
Makes virtual tours accessible for even the most technology-challenged of visitors.
5. Launch Virtual Product Demonstrations
Strategy: Use your virtual tour as a platform for live or recorded product demos
With the ability to embed pre-recorded videos and create hyperlinks direct to that content within a tour, you can utilise large screen areas as a way to unveil news announcements, product updates and more. For example, universities with lecture theatres or exhibition halls with seminar areas. Encouraging your followers to enter your building, watch the video and then continue exploring is a great way to drive new visitor engagement.
Alternatively, you can make this a live guided experience, with a host and connected audience exploring a facility together, with the host having the option to control the view that all guests are seeing and being able to answer any questions and present content such as slides.
Example:
Host a monthly webinar for top clients showcasing new industrial equipment within your virtual factory setting with live Q&As. Or host a virtual open-day tour of the facilities during a recruitment drive.
Benefit:
Provides an immersive communication channel that reinforces the importance of your location as part of the information cycle.
Measuring Your Virtual Tour’s Impact
The detailed data you can take from your virtual tour can help to shape future uses and drive new ideas for engagement. With analytics features including floor heat maps that show you the most popular areas of your tour, to full GA4-compatibility for custom reports, there’s a number of ways you can use data to increase your tour’s impact.
For instance:
- Track time spent in different tour sections to identify areas of high interest.
- Monitor click-through rates from tour hotspots to product pages.
- Analyse changes in lead quality and sales cycle length after implementing the virtual tour.
Key Takeaways:
- Virtual tours can significantly enhance your digital marketing and drive traffic to other key channels in your business through the implementation of simple but effective strategies that leverge virtual tour functionality built into the capture platform.
- Focus on creating interactive, informative experiences that guide prospects through your sales funnel and leverage your existing bank of visual media.
Are thereother opportunities you can think of that you woud like to try with a virtual tour? If so, get in touch and we’d be happy to explore the possibilities with you.
