All businesses need to market themselves, but for estate agents their entire existence is about marketing. They are marketing the business and properties, so everything is about selling. It sounds exhausting, but it doesn’t need to be. As an estate agent, marketing properties should come easily to you, but let us explain why building a plan for how to fully utilise design and marketing is vital to building your business too.
Location
Whilst you will need a strong online presence (more on this later) the location of your business will have a bearing on how you market it. After all, you are dealing with local people and local properties, so your name, branding and logos need to be in keeping with the area and the target market. Otherwise you will turn people away immediately in a location you are stuck in, at least for the short to medium term. You need your business to stand out, so don’t be afraid to be bold with colours and identity, but consider your target market, because your objective is to become a staple feature of the community and a trusted resource, so check out what your competitors are doing well and badly and see how you can make an impact, but the right one.
Literature
Marketing properties on flyers is all about presentation and making the homes look appealing. There is an art to this, but this should also be combined with marketing the business. So:
– use professional photography at all times
– have well-written, sharp copy that isn’t too wordy or misleading
– use your branding consistently throughout
– create presentation packs where a customer has everything they need about the property and the business, ie. property flyers, introduction to the business, key contact details and how the property process works.
Online presence
You might think being an estate agent is all about being in the locality, but everyone prefers searching online now in their own time, even if they live two streets away from your shop. So you need to build an accessible, well-presented and easy-to-navigate website where people can narrow down a search and target their own property criteria. Use the same photos you do on flyers, but you can also include more detailed information on the property and even set-up virtual tours, so people get a good idea of the property before they take a proper viewing. This narrows down viewings to a more committed level of potential customer. The website should be consistent with your other branding and messaging and you should also optimise it for mobile viewing, as more people view this kind of information on mobiles and tablets than on a desktop PC or laptop.
Social media
This is a critical tool in boosting your brand awareness and carrying a consistent message in line with your website and other literature. Social media accounts enable you to target potential customers easier, push certain properties and promote success stories for the business.
Measuring marketing success
Marketing will become a significant cost to an estate agent, this is inevitable and unavoidable, so you need to constantly monitor your success with it in order to make tweaks and improvements. You need to see a return on your investment on things like website development and physical flyers, so you can measure this with how many leads are turned into sales and the conversion rates of people browsing the website becoming customers.
Evolving the brand in the future
Once you have a marketing plan set up, it is essential that you don’t stop still and keep evolving the brand to build on successes and make improvements where things aren’t working. Some great design and marketing ideas for this are:
– Content: write some blog articles on property and become an authority in the market. Engaging content can be written skilfully to target key consumers in the property sector you want to specialise in, and search engine optimisation (SEO) can be used within this to drive traffic to your website. You can also try sponsored blog posts on other popular property sites which link to your site, although of course there will be a cost to this.
– Email marketing: develop a subscribers list and target people with a regular e-shot including properties they may be interested in. You can also send them blog articles and other content that helps develop your brand.
– Video tutorials: another way to become a trusted authority, but this time using technology that can combine well with social media. Become a visible face of the local property scene by presenting property news and taking tours of properties.
– Social media: your social media accounts can evolve to include property information, news and reaction to topical issues, and can also link to videos and other forms of content.
If you are an estate agent and looking for design and branding expertise, call us today on 01765 647100.