Virtual Tours for Schools

Intro

Virtual Tours for Schools

Welcome to another Momentum 360 blog! If this is your first time joining us, welcome! Just to give us a proper introduction, Momentum 360 is an international content company, HQ’d in Philadelphia that provides virtual tours, photography, videography, virtual staging and 3d rendering services to businesses of all sizes. We’ve been in business since 2017, so we know a little something about creating incredible content!

In this one, we’ll do a deep dive into virtual tours for schools, and why we believe they’re the most effective niche to get a virtual tour. Both head partners of Momentum, Mac Frederick and Sean Boyle went to Penn State and are extremely passionate about that, so they’ve always been involved in education and school, so what better way to give back to that community than to get them more prospective students as time goes on!

With that being said, let’s get started. If you’ve read our past blogs, thanks so much for coming back, it’s truly you the viewers, subscribers and readers who continue to help us build such an incredible work of content for you, so let’s keep that up. Let’s get into it, virtual tours for school!

Benefits of School Virtual Tours?

There are so many benefits to virtual tours for schools, the most trackable benefit is that you can expect the school to have an increased local search ranking. For example, keyphrases such as “schools near me” or “schools in (specific city or area)” will start ranking to your website! What’s great about this is that it’s not like pay-per-click advertising, where you need to pay month after month to have that same search ranking. With virtual tours, you essentially just pay a one time fee and achieve these new keyword rankings for years to come!

For example, here’s a tour we did for Franklin Town Charter School. If you go onto Google and search for “charter schools near me” or “charter schools port richmond” or “charter school northeast” you will see them at the top of Google!

Another example is one of the Philadelphia Electric Charter High School. We were able to help them get to the top of Google for key phrases such as “electrician high school near me”, “electrician high school philadelphia”, “electrician high school near me”, which is incredible, we have them competing with some colleges in the Philadelphia area too!

It just goes to show that these virtual tours, specifically this piece of content, helps schools get more website clicks and calls, thus having more applications from students coming into the school! We’ll go into more detail as the blog goes on showing why these school virtual tours are so powerful from a search engine optimization standpoint.

How do School Virtual Tours Work?

They’re pretty straightforward, right? We send a 360 photographer out to your school, they shoot 360 ground + drone panos for roughly 2-3 hours, then it takes about 2-3 business days to get you a fully optimized virtual tour!

Using the Franklin Towne example, I’ll show you how it works with shooting. For their tour, they wanted to showcase their entire space, inside and out! This was close to roughly 1 acre, which is pretty big, so we recommended taking a drone up to capture not only their space, but have city views in the background. They loved this idea for their school virtual tour, so we decided to schedule this tour for 10am, and we’d need to shoot for about 3-4 hours (longer than average) to capture everything. We only needed one 360 professional for this, we used the Ricoh Theta Z1 to capture the interior + exterior ground panos, and a DJI Mavic 2 to shoot the drone panos!

As you can see from the finished project, it came out pretty well if I may say so myself. The post production came out to be roughly 36 hours, so a day and a half to color correct, stitch, use filters, and remove the tripod from the bottom and load into the virtual tour software called Cloudpano that we used to actually build the school virtual tour.

For school virtual tours, we’d recommend doing a more comprehensive tour such as cloudpano, 3d vista or iGuide, not Matterport as it’s primarily meant for real estate and CAD, not marketing.

Virtual Tours for Schools

What Types of School Virtual Tours Are There?

There are so many different types of schools out there. Preschool, elementary, high school, trade schools, colleges, universities, language, pilot, etc, there’s so many types of schools out there!

The best part about it? They all get benefits from virtual tours, they don’t discriminate! If you’re looking for a school virtual tour and are worried that yours might be too small or too big to get digital benefits from, get that out of your head! Here at Momentum 360, we help schools of all sizes to get higher rankings on Google.

The difference between the smaller and larger schools we work with is the number of panos that we actually shoot. The smaller the school, the less panos we shoot, which if you think about it, means that it’s a shorter turnaround time to give to the client.

We’ve had turnaround times as short as 24 hours, and others as long as 4 months, it just depends on the scope of work and size of the project. We’d recommend taking this into account, if you need assets sooner rather than later, it might be better to have us shoot a smaller portion of the school, edit that and send to you so we can get something on your Google page, website and socials.

How Much Do School Virtual Tours Cost?

The single most important factor to pricing out our virtual tours is the square footage of your school. Momentum 360 normally charges roughly $0.06-0.10/square foot. The larger the school, the cheaper per square foot, the smaller the school, the more expensive per square foot, makes sense?

We’ve done shoots for as cheap as $500, and as expensive as $100,000+, it just all depends on the square footage and the budget of your school. If you don’t have a budget that fits into our pricing model, we’d recommend breaking up the payments monthly, so you can make sure each monthly payment will be made. For example, if we quote you $5000 for a virtual tour, our normal procedure is to get 50% down or $2500, then the other $2500 once the project is completed. We’d be able to have you pay $1000 for 5 months, or $500 for 10 months even if cash flow was an issue, we don’t have an issue with this, it’s just all about providing the value that you need to help out your business.

Most clients appreciate this offer and end up going with us for the sheer fact that we’re very honest with them and give them financing as an option. For us, it’s not about the money, it’s about the people that we can help. As cliche as this is, it’s clear that this works out in the end in contrast to charging too high of a price and not budging on any financing options.

Virtual Tours for Schools

What’s the Process of Getting a School Virtual Tour?

The process of getting a virtual tour for your school is very simple. Here is our 5 step system to getting a tour:

Call, email or fill out a form on our website to get a free quote
Talk with Momentum team + client to get a clear agreement, scope of work, and schedule
Get 50% deposit
Schedule project using our link
We show up the day and time of the shoot and produce a great virtual tour for you!

Like we’ve done for thousands of other clients, we like to build personal relationships with them to ensure we can continue working with them in the future for a lot of other cool related projects. We obviously don’t just do virtual tours, we have a lot of other great retainer projects that includes social media reels, google posts, website posts, etc which helps your local rankings!

Where are School Virtual Tours Posted Online?

We like to post our virtual tours on your website, social media, but most importantly your Google business page. The sooner we can post your tour to Google the better. Once we geotag every single pano with your coordinates of your area and a keyphrase you’d like to rank for, we’ll send it to you for approval.

Conclusion

Momentum 360 has been around since 2017, and has done hundreds of school virtual tours, and we look forward to working with you as well with your virtual tour!

Momentum 360 is a Premiere Small Business and Real Estate marketing company in Philadelphia and tri-state area. Our main service offerings are 3D Virtual Tours powered by Matterport, as well as photography and videography. We are both a Matterport Service Provider and Google Trusted Photography agency.

While 3D Virtual Tours started in real estate, they are versatile and applicable across every industry. Momentum 360 specializes in virtual tours for real estate, small businesses, restaurants, retail, healthcare, professional services, and much more. These virtual tours help our clients showcase their business online, while also allowing them to rank higher on Google with SEO, and get more followers on social media. Call for a quote!