For Randy Baruh, head of The Baruh Team at the Corcoran Group, a great video marketing strategy entertains viewers while promoting the business and listings. This philosophy is clearly working well for him. Baruh boasts more than 94,000 TikTok followers, and his YouTube videos typically top 30,000 views.
“Every single medium presents an opportunity to create a brand-new art form, and we’re using these art forms to promote our business,” he says.
According to the New York broker, his approach to marketing not only shows customers how he thinks outside the box, but it’s also a fun way to express his creativity.
“I’ve been in the business now for 21 years, and I’m always trying to improve, and I’m always trying to learn new things and grow to serve my clients better,” Baruh says, adding that he is embracing new mediums to expand his brand’s reach and appeal.
Baruh says promoting listings through TikTok and YouTube have helped expose his brand to a broader audience while also establishing him as an influencer and real estate professional.
“It’s helped get people to call me and want to hear about my thoughts on various subjects, which then kind of solidifies our knowledge of the market,” says Baruh. “When I’m meeting with new clients, it adds more to what we can bring to them—we have their trust because we show that we are doing things a certain way.”
@randy_baruhJust listed $10.9 MILLION townhome in NYC 🔥🔥🔥##GoForTheHandful ##realestate ##nyc ##foryou ##hometour♬ Backyard Boy – Claire Rosinkranz
The Content
Baruh channels his creativity through a series of videos that fuse his passion for theater and real estate.
“I always had this idea of trying to market properties and create engaging content and do it as a show—almost like every real estate video connects in some way thematically,” he says.
Before kicking off his real estate career in 2000, Baruh was a theater director in New York City for several years. While the past 21 years have been focused on growing his business, Baruh says he hasn’t lost his love for performing and directing, which has been evident in the content that he produces.
His YouTube channel serves as a timeline of Baruh’s content evolution, leading to his most recent videos that draw some of their inspiration from classic films and TV shows.
“It’s something that just lives in you and sticks with you and doesn’t leave and needs to be expressed,” Baruh says.
Work With What You Have
It doesn’t take a state-of-the-art studio to create entertaining content that will resonate with viewers, according to Baruh.
While he has started hiring professional writers and videographers in recent years, Baruh looks back on his earlier content with fondness because he had fun creating content with the only equipment he had: his phone.
“There was a time where I was getting my foot in real estate where I didn’t have the ad budget or the resources that I have now at my disposal, and I was just doing a lot of creative stuff on my phone,” Baruh says.
While his YouTube content tends to be professionally produced, Baruh still uses his iPhone to create content for his social media platforms—TikTok in particular.
“With the prevalence and ease of social media and YouTube, it’s like anybody can create a television show,” Baruh says. “So many of these shows that we watch on TV started out as streaming shows that people just created with their phones and uploaded to YouTube.”
Play to Your Strengths and Collaborate
Baruh advises individuals interested in creating marketing content to find out what they like that makes them unique.
“The first thing I will always say to people is ‘look inside yourself and find out why,'” Baruh says. “I’m interested in film and comedy and performance, but not everybody is into that.”
Instead, Baruh says it’s essential to play to your strengths and interests and then collaborate to fill in gaps to create content.
“I’m a big believer in ‘it takes a village,’ and so you want to surround yourself with people who inspire you,” Baruh says. “If you’re a big data person and you get really into data, but you’re not super comfortable with being in front of the camera, there are enough people in real estate that would love to get in front of the camera. Find a colleague and feed them all the information, and then you’d both be doing each other a favor.”
In Baruh’s case, he has incorporated his son, Max, into his marketing content for the past four years. Some of his more popular videos have gained thousands of views and show Max Baruh as an all-star member of his father’s real estate team.
Baruh has also featured several of his son’s friends in his content, which he says has also helped him spread the word about his business and the listings he promotes.
“I got this idea for ‘Million Dollar Listing’ meets ‘The Office’ with kids, and that’s when I brought my son in because he’s free, he loves to act and be in videos, and he is adorable,” Baruh says. “That’s how we got the idea for the first one, and then it blossomed from there into ‘how else can I tell this story with children?'”
Jordan Grice is RISMedia’s associate content editor. Email him your real estate news to jgrice@rismedia.com.