When creating a Virtual tour is a GOOD idea?

The last article I wrote was about when investing in a virtual tour is NOT worth it. Some of you wrote to me to say that this is just half of the story and that virtual tours are beneficial to other business cases that I did not mention. And you are right, so today, I will talk about the second half of the coin—when investing in a virtual tour IS WORTH IT.

So, let’s get into in

I divided the article into 2 parts:

• Firstly, what benefits can virtual tours bring to my company?
• Secondly, I will talk about industries for which the virtual tours are generally worth it. 

Benefits of having a virtual tour

Firstly, I will discuss the most frequent benefits of virtual tours and why companies invest in them. 

Well, a virtual tour is broadly speaking an opportunity to let your visitors (customers, employees, business partners, buyers, …) explore your space online in a 360° view so that they can easily explore your space and fall in love with it. 

So, the first and most obvious benefit of virtual tours is that users can explore the space in a 360° view.

… Try a 360° vie of this hotel room with balcony below.

Other benefits are:

Immersive Experience: People are used to traditional media types and want to explore new and innovative immersive media. Companies invest in an immersive and interactive experience to gain the wow effect and be more memorable to the target audience.

Building Trust and Transparency: Virtual tours can show the space in a 360° view so that no detail is missed. Virtual tours are from nature transparent and will let the user explore every detail of a given space without exception.

Convenience and accessibility: Every virtual tour compared to a physical tour is accessible to anyone from anywhere and anytime. So that your visitors can easily explore your spaces on the other side of the world (even at 2 am).

Increased engagement: Interactive elements create much better engagement than static media. Just compare a static photo with a 360° photo – which do you think will have more engagement? 

Better conversion rate: Virtual tours can make a huge impact on the improvement of the sales funnel by providing more information and if done correctly creating more leads for the business.

Cost-effectiveness: Virtual tours can save a lot of time and money for the company (compared to physical tours, preparation of the space, human resources, …)

Industries where virtual tours are frequently used 

Some industries are more likely to benefit from a virtual tour than others. But what are those? Does our company operate in this industry?

Let’s see.

These industries are:

•               Real estate and property management

•               Hospitality industry

•               Education and Campus Tours

•               Cultural institutions (museums, galleries, …)

•               Retail and Showrooms

•               Event venues and conference spaces

•               Healthcare and Senior Living Facilities

•               Training (employee training, …)

Real Estate and Property Management

The real estate industry is one of the most obvious industries which can benefit from virtual tours.

Why obvious? Well, because virtual tours are frequently used to showcase properties from everywhere in the world.

Virtual tours are created to showcase the spaces and save time and money (xxx) to prospective buyers (renters), real estate agents and clients.

Benefits of virtual tours specific to real estate:

• Virtual tours can help buyers better understand the property layout.
• Save time and money on showcasing the property physically.
• Converting from cold leads to hot leads!!!

DEBUNKING THE MYTH – Some real estate agents think that by having a virtual tour, they will decrease the number of physical tours and therefore decrease the number of sales. And that is why they choose to not create a virtual tour. But it does not work like this, the virtual tour can be seen by many more people online, so that the pool of clients can be even bigger. The virtual tour works as a filtering device so that only the potential clients who are interested in buying (renting) will book a physical tour. This means that for the real estate agent, this method would lead to a much better conversion rate and much higher sales. 

Hospitality Industry (Hotels, Resorts, and Vacation Rentals)

The second business use case for using a virtual tour is the hospitality industry.

Why? Well, because virtual tours are great at showcasing beautiful spaces and hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, bars, resorts, conference spaces, …. (the list goes on and on) are just something that customers want to see before making the reservation.

Well, no one likes to buy something before knowing what they are paying for, right?

Virtual tours enable the users (hospitality customers) to explore a given property before making any phone call or making any reservation. This way the customers can explore the space online and find out by themselves if the offering, space, or accommodation is what they are looking for or not.

The main benefits of virtual tours for the hospitality industry:

• Can boost your online presence on Google with Google virtual tours and push you google business profile to more potential customers.
• Virtual tour creates trust by being transparent with the offering.
• Can highlight specific features of the room, amenities, or other cool aspect of your space with interactive elements (such as open-door effect)
• And of course, increase the booking rate.

Education and Campus Tours

The education sector can benefit a lot from a virtual tour too. How? I give you some examples.

Attracting new students: Schools and universities need every year to attract new applicants to join their institutions. They can persuade them of their highly valuable lectures, smart professors, prestige, great community, or amazing-looking premises (spaces).

With the last two points a virtual tour can help, because it can capture the space with students who are studying and living their best life (student life). It can provide valuable information to future students and to their parents. It’s basically an event called Open Day, but with one big change – it’s accessible every single day. 

If you want to hire a virtual tour creator to create a virtual tour of your university or school, check out if the creator can create a user-friendly interface.

Why? Well, if you are creating a virtual tour of a big space or more than 2 buildings, the virtual tour can make it hard for the user to go from one place to the second.

That is why we do not recommend using a Matterport for this use case because these virtual tours can include hundreds of 360° photos and are hard to use for a lot of people. It is not easy to go from one place to the other. So, find a creator who can create a user-friendly interface with an easy-to-use menu system.

Museums, Galleries, and Cultural Institutions

Another industry that can benefit from virtual tours is the entertainment industry in general. These institutions are in most cases not using any interactive and modern technology and that is why there is a unique opportunity to provide your visitors more value with interactive 360° content.

Some exhibits are for international visitors and a virtual tour is one of the only ways how visitors can explore it online without traveling there.

Another example of using virtual tours for museums or galleries is to showcase a trial of free tasting. So, that you can showcase with virtual tour just some part of the exhibition, but not the whole. This method works as a great marketing promotion. And try to persuade visitors to come to see the whole exhibition.

Retail and Showrooms

Showrooms and retail shops are also spaces that can benefit a lot from virtual tours, because of two reasons.

Firstly, it can give potential customers a sense of the actual space (in other words what to expect by visiting the shop). And secondly, the virtual tour can show its products so that customers can explore them and buy them straight away.

Event Venues and Conference Centers

Even though it may be categorized as a hospitality industry, which we talked about earlier. I want to emphasize the value of the venues especially.

Virtual tours can showcase the venue in detail and help the event planner, client, and owner.

For the event planner, the virtual tour can show how the space can actually look in different variations and help the planner create the best possible event according to the client’s preferences.

The virtual tour can help the client better imagine how the space can actually look in the different layout variations, different lighting, or different event types and choose the one which suit best the client’s preferences.

If the vision of the event is clear the preparation of the space can be done faster, and no changes need to be made afterwards.

Healthcare and Senior Living Facilities

Another business use case for virtual tours is healthcare and senior living facilities.

Virtual tours here are used to build trust and ease concern by showcasing cleanliness, possibility, and professional care.

This experience can provide potential patients and their families the chance to explore a given facility or senior living space before making a really important decision.

Employee training and security (safety) protocol

Last on this list is virtual tour as a training tool for businesses.

You can show your spaces for example to your employees and let them understand what their future working space will look like with a virtual tour. Or even create an employee training inside a virtual tour to educate them on new strategies, security, or safety protocols.

This way your company can save a lot of time by not explaining every concept individually and save even more time on onboarding new workers. 

So, here you have it. There are numerous industries that can benefit from having a virtual tour in place.

BUT keep in mind that this list is not full! This is just the tip of the iceberg.

I mentioned just the most common industries that can benefit a lot from virtual tours. If you use your creativity, I’m positive that you can find another industry that can benefit from virtual tours.

At the end, I would love to give you a bonus recommendation about creating a virtual tour.

One rule to ensure that creating a virtual tour is a great idea is _____? 

Choose the right virtual tour creator for your company goals and industry.

That’s important because professional creators can create for your business extraordinary virtual tour which can help you reach your business goals much faster.

So, take your time when choosing the right one.

5 important

Here is the article about 5 important things to consider when choosing a virtual tour creator which should help you choose the right creator for your coampany.

If you are still not sure, ask a couple of creators for consultation. Most of them will be happy to give you some idea if virtual tours will be a great investment for your company or not.