Craig Veroni is a real estate agent in Vancouver, British Columbia, serving North Vancouver, West Vancouver, and Vancouver city itself. Before moving into real estate, he spent over a decade training and working as a professional film and television actor.

The moment he started applying that craft to his marketing, video became one of the biggest drivers of his business. Educational YouTube videos and cinematic property tours helped buyers understand local neighbourhoods and the housing market.

But when a fire and flooding in the unit above him affected his home and forced his family to move out for nearly a year, his video production came to a standstill.

"We had been out of our house for around nine months," he said. "I couldn't produce any content. I didn't have any gear."

Expanding his presence without increasing the workload

For most of his career, Craig built trust by working open houses, meeting people in person, and turning a YouTube channel into his primary lead source, eventually generating around 75 per cent of his business from it.

But that content was quite demanding to produce. His best-performing neighbourhood tours meant scripting every segment, shooting on camera across several neighbourhoods, and then editing everything together, a process that could take more than a week for a single video.

Getting back in front of his audience meant rebuilding the engine that had powered his business. The turning point came when he saw fellow agents using HeyGen to grow completely new social channels with AI avatars.

"I thought, 'This sounds a bit wild and perhaps too good to be true,'" he said.

Curious, he joined a small training group. Over three days, Craig built his digital twin, refined his content workflow, and published his first Instagram Reel.

"I was really nervous because I'm known for my video," he said. "I thought people were going to dislike this."

Creating a digital twin that buyers can truly trust

Craig believes the twin worked because it was created using his own high-quality material. Instead of starting from scratch, he trained his avatar on the library of footage he had already recorded, capturing his real appearance and mannerisms across different settings.

He paired it with professionally recorded voice models, refined into an indoor voice for studio-style clips and an outdoor voice that sounds natural on location. He uses the latest avatar model and upgrades it every time a better one is released.

Craig uses the digital twin to keep his audience updated about local news and market developments, rather than chasing trends or creating novelty clips.

"The twin exists to keep people updated about what’s happening locally, the news, and to provide them with information," Craig said.

Accuracy is non-negotiable. He writes, reviews, and fact-checks every script against carefully sourced local market data before generating a video, and he labels every Reel as AI so that he is never misleading anyone.

"Everything has to be very, very accurate," he said. "The moment I lose the trust of my audience, it's game over."

Turning followers into a trusted local presence

Within the first week, Craig noticed something that was equally exciting and humbling.

"Every single post I had made had performed better than anything I did myself," he said.

What mattered more to him was that the connection stayed intact. Some viewers asked whether the videos were AI, while others had no idea and were quite surprised to learn the truth. Then the real validation came in person.

"On three different occasions, complete strangers stopped me," Craig said. "One man pulled over while I was walking my dog and said, 'I'm a subscriber. I really like what you do. Thank you for doing it.'"

The viewer had no idea that the person he had just spoken to was not the same version he watched online. For Craig, that was exactly the point.

"The connection was working," he said. It was the sort of recognition that pushed him towards a bigger goal: becoming what he calls the "digital mayor" of his city.

Turning consistency into wider reach and stronger recognition

With the twin managing his news content, Craig went from producing one video a week to two Reels a day, a pace that would have been impossible with traditional filming. The reach grew accordingly.

Over roughly ten months, his Instagram following quadrupled, growing from around 1,500 to nearly 6,000. His content now reaches more than 7,70,000 accounts in a typical month and generates 60,000 to 70,000 interactions, with individual Reels regularly crossing 1,00,000 views.

Equally valuable is what the twin enables him to do. The time it saves goes back into one-to-one work with clients, including personalised video follow-ups, an approach that has helped him re-engage past clients and close significant business.

"The digital twin helps free up my time so I can do more one-on-one work with my clients," he said.

When asked to sum up the platform, he did not hesitate.

"HeyGen is by far the best and most effective platform for scaling my video content," he said. "I haven't come across any other platform that can match it."

Today, Craig sees his digital twin not as a replacement for himself, but as an extension of his expertise.

"If you want to be seen and heard and provide value," he said, "HeyGen is an amazing tool to achieve that."