Where to find free images and videos for your property community
You’ve done it. You’ve built or acquired a brand-new property, hired a team to manage it, set up fantastic amenities, and are just starting to get new tenants in. It’s a big challenge, but it isn’t your first rodeo. You know it’ll take the full weight of your management skills, PropTech tools, and experience to fully lease this building, and keep those occupiers in place and happy. One thing you’re looking forward to rolling out is your new content plan, which includes active social media accounts, blog posts, and a newsletter of your own for your property.
The need for content
Whether you’re working with office or multifamily properties, keeping this stream of articles and posts flowing is something that is worth pursuing. People are catching on, too. According to research from HubSpot, the marketing automation tool, 28 percent of surveyed respondents plan to begin investing in content marketing in 2021, versus last year’s figure of just 17 percent.
But producing that content is not always easy. Sourcing writers, or committing to writing posts and articles on a consistent basis is time consuming. Deciding on topics, finding interviews, connecting with your community to share their stories, actually posting your content – all of these things take even more time. And one new blog post in three months won’t have much impact on prospective tenants or existing ones considering renewing their leases. Consistency is key.
Property marketers do have one advantage: since the field of real estate is so integrative, it’s always easy to find raw topic ideas to talk about, from design to experience to tech and beyond. But even after you’ve penned your article or post, even if you take advantage of tools like Spaceflow post templates, you’ll still have one more big task before your article or post is ready to share with its audience of property occupiers.
Content needs visuals
Finding artwork for every post is one of the more unexpected time sinks when planning a content campaign. For maximum impact, every piece of content you publish should be accompanied by at least one high-quality image.
This goes for blog posts, which typically look best with a great image thumbnail as well as several other images throughout the copy of the article. It goes for research reports and white papers, which are typically much longer than articles and benefit from illustrative pictures as well as charts, graphs, and tables that display important building metrics. It matters to social media posts, since unless you’re linking to another article that already has an image, you’ll need to find your own photo or gif to accompany text posts. And of course, if you’re pursuing video creation, it matters there too, every second of its runtime. Finding the images and videos to fill all this content can be challenging, especially if you’re working with a limited budget.
Whether you’re planning content that will appear on your apartment app or office platform, here are some of the best sources for free creative assets to help your property be the best that it can be. We’re focusing on photos and videos in this article, since photos will almost certainly be the most important creative asset that most real estate marketers need on a regular basis, and videos are typically a little harder to source independently than images.
Needless to say, simply saving photos down from Google or social networks to use in your blog posts could land you in a world of trouble, so consider using these free resources instead. Each of these sources provides free content, but perhaps more importantly, none of them require any attribution to the source or photographer. While it is always a nice courtesy to attribute voluntarily, these image and video sources don’t require it.
"Each of these sources provides free content, but perhaps more importantly, none of them require any attribution to the source or photographer."
The tools
Pexels
Pexels is a fantastic source for high-quality images and videos as well. Searching for “digital office,” for instance, comes up with 18 video results and almost 900 photos.
Unsplash
Unsplash is all about high-quality photographs. Many of these images have a slightly more artistic flair than others out there, so if you’re looking for great free photos, Unsplash could make for a great first place to check. Spaceflow clients and their user communities can search for and upload photos within the Spaceflow app itself, making finding images for posts and other types of content even easier.
Pixabay
Pixabay offers a large library of photographs as well, but beyond that, it also features a great number of illustrations and vector images, perfect for easily customizing, removing backgrounds, and mixing different images together in new combinations. It also offers videos and even music, in case you need to add an audio element to your property content.
Coverr
This site is dedicated to offering free videos, no attribution required. If you’re looking for a consistent, focused source of video clips to amp up your property experience, look no further than Coverr.
Building a library of property content can be difficult, but using the right tools can make it easier. These four sources of free creative assets are perfect complements to the start of a concerted property content marketing effort. Add onto that the custom branding resources provided by platforms like Spaceflow and you’ll be acing your property content game in no time.
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