Filming and photography has come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years, to the point where you can now make use of 360° panoramic shots and virtual tours.

You have doubtless seen how virtual tours work if you have ever looked at Google Street View, which itself only began 12 years ago and now covers a major part of the world. Today there are companies who can create a virtual tour of your business, your farm, your office, your country estate, or of anything else that you wish.

Why would you want a virtual tour created anyway? There could be any one of dozens, if not hundreds, of reasons. For instance, let’s say you operate a campsite - a big one. Instead of showing potential customers a few photographs you can take them on a virtual tour of the site instead. You can show them around the fields where they can camp, show them the café, the car park, the shower block, or anything else. You can take them inside the shower block to show how modern and hygienic everything is. It gives your potential customers a real feel for what it is going to be like spending their holiday with you.

Not only can you provide a virtual tour, but you can have video content added to a 360° panorama. You can also have audio, so you can have a presenter or an actor explaining what the viewer is watching, what time the café opens for breakfast, the sort of things that it serves, and so on. You could even speak over the tour yourself if you wanted to. You could also have hotspots, pop-up boxes, stills, and links to web pages included.

Furthermore, a virtual tour can give the viewer controls so that he or she can speed up or slow down the picture, change direction, zoom in and zoom out, and so on.

Suppose you have an advert for new employees to join your business. You can take prospective applicants for a virtual tour of your offices showing them all the different features. You could show them the office that they will work in if they get the job. You can take them on a virtual tour of your factory floor showing the type of machines that you have, what it is that they make, how they operate, and the sorts of tasks that the new employee will be expected to carry out. You can have an interview with existing employees talking about how great it is to work in your company and some of the perks of the job.

Another great use for a virtual tour is for an estate agent to show prospective purchasers around a house. Instead of the usual half a dozen photos you can show people around the kitchen, where everything is located, show them the lounge, the bathroom, take them for a tour of the garden and then show them the view up and down the road so that they can see it is a tree-lined street, or not as the case may be. This is just so much better than a listing which tells them that the bathroom has a vanity suite: you can show it instead.

Another use for a virtual tour is a product demonstration. Potential customers are able to see your product from all angles, which is very much like picking it up in their hands and turning it around themselves. So they get a real feel for your product and what to expect from it. This would be especially useful if you are, say, an antique dealer and you want to show an item. You can show them around the item, turn it over to show the authentication by the manufacturer on the base, at the same time explaining that, of course, there is only one of these for sale and if the viewer wants it he had better get over to your shop fast.

There are certainly many reasons why a virtual tour is much better than a few still photographs and a short, written description. If you look around, you will find companies that can produce a virtual tour for you very quickly and with minimal input from yourself.