Immersive virtual tours are all the rage right now. They shine a spotlight on points of interest and provide a whole new perspective for viewers. They’re relatively easy to create and best of all, viewers can access them on any device.
Gradually dominating company websites, virtual tours have been the preferred channel of real estate professionals, travel agencies, educational institutions, hotel owners, interior designers, architects and other industries to showcase property listings, professional portfolios or establishment locations.
In this post, we’ll demonstrate how to create a virtual tour and how you can share it to your audience through your website.
How are virtual tours useful?
Virtual tour is the most recent trend that can skyrocket your business conversion rates. So before we go about with ways to do virtual tour, let’s take a look at the benefits you can get from using it.
- Since a virtual tour is visually appealing and highly explorable, it’s the best way to showcase and promote any property.
- A virtual tour highlights your property and makes it stand out among the competition.
- Prospects gain a visual structure of your property, so if they pay you a visit, chances are they’re interested in purchasing what you’ve shown or availing your services. This makes all the time and effort you put into your work worth it.
- There are many ways to do a virtual tour, but all of them are really cheap and easy to do.
- Business with virtual tours on their sites come across as highly dependable since viewers feel like they’re actually exploring the property, location or service you’re selling. According to a research from the Journal of Advertising Research, customers who underwent a virtual tour felt like the retailers behind the product or site put in more genuine effort to what they’re marketing. In sum, virtual tours are viewed by consumers as more reliable and thus becomes a successful and powerful means of promotion for businesses.
- Virtual tours spike interest. Numbers from Google declare that 62% of site visitors opt for listings with photos and tours of the site. They prompt customers to complete a transaction 29% of the time.
- Virtual tours reel in more traffic to your website.
So now you know how are virtual tours useful. It boosts business and is extremely easy to construct and implement.
Now, let us tell you more about the ways to do virtual tours and tips to make sure your audience makes the most out of them.
Ways to build a virtual tour your customers will enjoy
1. Prioritize visibility and accessibility
One of the most essential virtual tour tips is becoming more visible and accessible for your audience.
Visual storytelling unlocks a slew of emotions for customers as they make a purchasing choice. Maximize this by looping engagement with your tours. Translate each visual tour click to an engagement count and talk to your customers within the tour through meaningful information, sign-up suggestions, bookings or event invitations and registrations.
You can also synchronize all your channels and initiatives in your virtual tour, so viewers can gain a cohesive and convenient experience. This is especially useful for customers that only look at virtual tours and make them the sole basis of purchasing a property or availing a service.
As for accessibility, guarantee your website and virtual tour run successfully for everyone. Set up a well-organized and fully functioning site, with a special focus on important data and code markup. Optimize it and include features and design aspects that also cater to persons with disabilities.
Between 110 to 190 million people are experiencing significant disabilities worldwide, as per data from Worldbank. That’s 15% of the global market you’re not reaching if you don’t have functionalities for PWDs.
2. Make your virtual experience searchable
Despite the many benefits of a virtual tour, if your customers can’t find it, they won’t get to enjoy it. Part of knowing how to create a virtual tour includes formatting and fitting it to the right place on your website.
Make sure the dimensions of your tour are accurate to where you’re pinning it so viewers can explore all the property or service features you’ve highlighted. It also helps to place your virtual tour in an area audience and prospects can easily spot, so it grabs their attention. This can be on your home page or on a frequently visited part of your website.
If it’s not located in either, include your virtual tour on your main menu bar or list call to actions that indicate your virtual experience. You can also make your virtual tour searchable on your platform via search bar, so any customer can view your property, location or service without leaving the comforts of their home.
3. Get a virtual tool software
Virtual tours are great tools for any companies that are grounded on properties, facilities, geographical sites or locations. It’s one of the reasons why real estate agents use 360 tours and why tour companies and interior designers prefer the virtual experience to highlight their services.
As we’ve said, it’s a growing trend that can captivate customers. To maximize this, you need to have the right tools to construct an effective and engaging virtual tour.
Ultimately, it helps to get a virtual tour creator. There are plenty of benefits of using a virtual tour software such as powerful functions that can make building virtual tours easier.
Although it comes with plenty of functionalities, it’s affordable and easy to use. It allows users to take into account every room within their property, which might take more time than usual marketing strategies but will also usher in more benefits such as unique user experience and increased revenue.
With virtual tool software, users can also rely on excellent image quality. Customers love it when they can view sites and properties clearly, especially since most of them want to see what you’re offering before they come to you or without even having the need to do so.
Ready to experience what it’s like having a virtual tour creator? We offer all these services and additional resources on how to create a virtual tour. Contact us and see what we can do to promote your properties and services.
4. Make your virtual tours more engaging
Virtual tours are already engaging, but customers are more likely to view and use your virtual tours if you add more interactive features that can make your tours nicer such as scene looping and auto-rotation, which makes your tour more lively.
You can also highlight what sets you apart from other companies through call-to-action features and define each scene and add floor plans in your tour through a menu, so your visuals are easy to navigate. It also doesn’t hurt to put in a little ambient music.
Gather more engagement by enabling users to share your virtual tours on their social media channels through a special link that immediately depicts a selected featured image of your site
Social media is a great way to reach more people, with 53.6% of the world’s population actively signed up on social media sites in 2021, as per Data Reportal. It’s also a highly visual platform, so whichever way you decide to go with when learning how to create a virtual tour, it’s a good idea to be able to distribute it easily on social media.
5. Get upgrades for your site
It’s time to level up and keep maximizing the advantages you get from these highly interactive visuals.
For instance, some visual tour software allows you to create a number of virtual tours with a limited number of scenes for free. Why not upgrade your subscription to create more tours and generate more value? You can also begin unlocking more features that can make your virtual tours more engaging for your audience.
Here at Panopedia, we give you three free virtual tours with a capacity of three scenes per tour when you sign up. If you want to make more tours or if you’re sick of deleting and replacing your existing ones, you can upgrade to a higher plan that still remains affordable.
6. Dive into meaningful resources
There’s an abundance of materials on how to create a virtual tour, so it’s not a problem to find what you’re looking for or to ask for help when improving your tours.
From video tutorials, detailed manuals to even the opinion of your customers, you can pick up new insights to make your virtual tours more interactive and ensure your viewers will use them while browsing.
7. Call in the experts
If you have enough resources, you can hire designers specializing in virtual tours. Allow them to take care of creating them since they already know how to create virtual tours and how are virtual tours useful for your business.
You can also consult virtual tour software providers, since they have a wide array of functionalities and resources that can help you construct your very own virtual tour.
A new look at the market
With virtual tours, customers can look at any destination or site anywhere in the world anytime, without getting out of their house or getting up from their office desk. The technology is truly revolutionary and growing with each passing day.
Because of its benefits for buyers, virtual tours have the power to make you stand out in the crowd and make you more accessible to customers across the globe. Use that power wisely and learn how to create a virtual tour that’s simultaneously interactive and informative.